Rule catalog · Transport security

TLS certificate has at least 14 days until expiry

tls_certificate_not_expiring_soonlowweight 2Perimeter

Authored by Stanley Hong · AgentReserve (founder).

The peer certificate's `notAfter` is at least 14 days in the future. Certificates that expire imminently cause sudden client-side failures and indicate an unmanaged renewal process.

When this rule runs

Evaluated on every scan — observable from the URL, TLS handshake, or HTTP response headers, even when the MCP layer is auth-walled or unresponsive.

Why it matters

A certificate that expires in days, not months, is one renewal misfire away from a hard outage. It's a leading indicator of operational hygiene more than a direct security finding.

Pass condition

`notAfter - now` is at least 14 days.

Fail condition

`notAfter - now` is less than 14 days (or already in the past).

Evidence examples

When the rule fails, the report records evidence in roughly this shape:

  • {"daysUntilExpiry": 3}

Remediation

Automate certificate renewal (cert-manager, ACM, Let's Encrypt with certbot) and alert on `< 30 days` to expiry.

Methodology

This rule belongs to the Transport security dimension. How the server is reached on the wire. Covers TLS and protocol-level confidentiality of probe traffic.

Read the full methodology for how rules are aggregated into a score, how verdicts are decided, and how hard-fail rules override the aggregate.