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Certificates used to be issued with validity up to 10 years way back. There's no technical bound on the validity period AFAIK, but all major browsers will now refuse to trust certificates with validity periods > 1 year so this can be considered the practical limit.

I'm not aware of a dedicated service that offers free 1-year certs in the style of LetsEncrypt, but they'll often be available from e.g. hosting providers as part of a package. Hard to imagine a use-case where 90-day renewals aren't a better option, anyway.



The bound is basically set by the CA/Browser Forum [1] where the current baseline requirements [2] are stipulating:

"6.3.2

Certificate operational periods and key pair usage periods Subscriber Certificates issued on or after 1 September 2020 SHOULD NOT have a Validity Period greater than 397 days and MUST NOT have a Validity Period greater than 398 days. Subscriber Certificates issued after 1 March 2018, but prior to 1 September 2020, MUST NOT have a Validity Period greater than 825 days. Subscriber Certificates issued after 1 July 2016 but prior to 1 March 2018 MUST NOT have a Validity Period greater than 39 months.

For the purpose of calculations, a day is measured as 86,400 seconds. Any amount of time greater than this, including fractional seconds and/or leap seconds, shall represent an additional day. For this reason, Subscriber Certificates SHOULD NOT be issued for the maximum permissible time by default, in order to account for such adjustments."

- CA-Browser-Forum BR 1.7.9, p67

[1] https://cabforum.org/

[2] https://cabforum.org/baseline-requirements-documents/




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