Limitation of the duration of SMIME certificates cancelled

3 February 2022

In October last year it was announced that at the initiative of Apple, the validity term of S/MIME certificates would be limited to 2 years from April 1 this year.It now appears that the maximum permitted validity term is 3 years.

This can be deduced from Apple's new guidelines for S/MIME certificates that will come into effect from 1 February: the maximum allowed validity term is set at 1185 days, so three years.

The reason for this change is currently unknown.