Does the renewal of certificate follow the same process as issuing a new certificate?

[pfg]

There are plans to reduce authorization lifespans, yes. This announcement has some details:

@jsha

Shorter authorization lifetimes

Estimated date: August 3.

Right now, when you complete a challenge, your account gets a validated authorization object that can be used for certificate issuance for 10 months. That's much longer than necessary. We're going to change the lifetime for new authorization objects to 90 days. Existing, validated authorization objects will keep their same lifetime.

Eventually, we'd like to make authorization objects much shorter than certificate lifetimes, probably 7 days. However, we're taking this intermediate step to ensure a smooth transition. We don't yet have an estimated date for further reduction, but roughly speaking it may be this fall. Thanks to @pfg for the pull request making this configurable.