RDS Certificate Authority EOL

Hello there,

When you receive a warning that the RDS (Amazon Relational Database Service) Certificate Authority (CA) is due to expire, it's important to take action to update the certificate to prevent service disruptions and security risks. The RDS CA is used to secure SSL/TLS connections to your RDS instances, and if it expires, it can lead to potential problems. Here are some key points to consider:

Risks Associated with Not Updating the Certificate:

1. Service Disruption: If the RDS CA certificate expires, any client applications, tools, or services that connect to your RDS instances using SSL/TLS may experience disruptions. They may be unable to establish secure connections to the database.

2. Security Risks: An expired certificate could potentially expose your data to security risks. SSL/TLS certificates are crucial for encrypting data in transit between your application and the RDS database. Without a valid certificate, data transmission may not be encrypted properly.

3. Compliance and Auditing: Depending on your industry and regulatory requirements, using an expired certificate may lead to compliance violations. It's essential to keep your SSL/TLS certificates up to date to meet security and compliance standards.

Steps to Take:

1. Plan Ahead: Start planning to update the RDS CA certificate well in advance of the expiration date. This allows you to schedule the update during a maintenance window that is convenient for your application and users.

2. Review AWS Documentation: AWS provides documentation and guides for updating RDS CA certificates. Refer to the official AWS documentation specific to your RDS database engine for detailed instructions.

3. Test the Update: Before applying the update to your production RDS instances, test it in a non-production or staging environment. Ensure that your applications and services can establish connections to the RDS instances using the new CA certificate.

4. Schedule Downtime: Depending on your database engine and RDS instance configuration, updating the CA certificate may require a brief maintenance window or a database instance reboot. Plan accordingly and communicate with your team and stakeholders about any scheduled downtime.

5. Update Connection Strings: If your applications use specific connection strings or configurations that reference the RDS CA certificate, make sure to update them to use the new certificate's root CA.

6. Monitor After the Update: After updating the certificate, closely monitor your RDS instances and applications for any issues. Check for errors in the logs and ensure that all connections are working as expected.

7. Consider Automation: Depending on your infrastructure and deployment practices, you may want to automate the certificate update process to prevent similar issues in the future.

In summary, it is not acceptable to ignore the expiration of the RDS CA certificate. Failing to update it could lead to service disruptions and security vulnerabilities. By following best practices, planning, and testing the update process, you can minimize risks and ensure a smooth transition to the new certificate before the old one expires.

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Hello.

Updating the RDS certificate will require downtime as it will require a reboot.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/UsingWithRDS.SSL-certificate-rotation.html

For updating, you need to do the following:

• Download a new SSL/TLS certificate.
• Update your applications to use new SSL/TLS certificates.
• Alter the DB instance to change the CA from rds-ca-2019 to rds-ca-rsa2048-g1 (rds-ca-rsa4096-g1 or rds-ca-ecc384-g1 depending on your DB engine) .

The official documentation includes a sample script for importing a certificate, which I hope will be useful to you.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/UsingWithRDS.SSL-certificate-rotation.html#UsingWithRDS.SSL-certificate-rotation-sample-script