SSH CAs uploaded to GitHub.com after March 27th, or in GHES 3.13 and beyond, can only sign certificates that expire. They must expire within 366 days of being created.
While expirations on certificates are not required by signing tools such as ssh-keygen, we are enforcing this best practice in order to protect against a weakness in how SSH certificates are linked to users.
CAs uploaded before the cutoff date or release will be marked in the UI as being allowed to sign non-expiring certificates:
An “upgrade” option on the CA lets you enforce expiration of signed certificates. Once you’ve validated that you are indeed using a lifetime on your certificates, we recommend upgrading your CAs. This upgrade step is irreversible, and new CAs cannot be downgraded to allow non-expiring certificates.
If a certificate is signed with no expiration, or a too-long expiration, it will be rejected during SSH connection with an error indicating The SSH certificate used was issued for a longer period than allowed.
This change forces the valid_after issuance timestamp to be written to the certificate, which allows GitHub to detect if the user changed their username after the certificate was issued for that username. This prevents a reuse attack vector where the former holder of a username is able to use certificates issued to them to sign in as the new holder of that username.
To learn more about managing SSH CAs, see “Managing your organization’s SSH CAs” and “Managing SSH CAs for your enterprise.” For information on using SSH CAs, see “About SSH CAs.”