Re: [Acme] Assisted-DNS challenge type

[Niklas Keller <[e-mail]>]

2018-01-23 8:09 GMT+01:00 Ilari Liusvaara <[e-mail]>:

> On Mon, Jan 22, 2018 at 05:09:53PM -0800, Jacob Hoffman-Andrews wrote:
> >
> > To fix that, the CA could assist the user by providing narrowly-scoped
> > DNS hosting: It would serve only TXT records used in validating DNS
> > challenges. The CA instruct subscribers to delegate the _acme-challenge
> > subdomain to a subdomain of the CA's hosted DNS domain. For instance, if
> > a subscriber has account number 1234, the CA would say: Please deploy a
> > CNAME record like so:
> >
> > _acme-challenge.example.com. CNAME 1234.challenges.ca.example.net.
> >
> > The assisted-dns-01 challenge would then be validated like dns-01,
> > except: As the first step in validation, the CA would deploy the
> > expected TXT value at 1234.challenges.ca.example.net. Then the CA would
> > continue to look up "TXT _acme-challenge.example.com." In a way,
> > fetching final TXT record would be a formality: the CA could in theory
> > stop once it saw the CNAME pointed at the right location, though most
> > likely abiding by the terms of the BRs would require following the
> > formal lookup steps.
> >
> > This challenge has the big advantage that subscribers only need to do a
> > one-time CNAME setup, and renewals can be reliably automated without
> > requiring that renewing systems have permission to update DNS. In
> > effect, the CNAME record would act like a long-term delegation
> > permitting the CA to issue continuously for the base domain.
>
> I came up with very similar method when trying to figure out how the
> Amazon Certificate Manager DNS challenge works. It has similar
> "standing authentication" property, and yet needs to comply with the
> BRs.
>

This seems very much like a circumvention of the BRs. Either this
circumvention should be forbidden, because it effectively doesn't re-prove
ownership, or the BRs can be changed to allow permanent authorization for
accounts, then we don't need the CA to host anything like that.

We could then allow e.g. an account key thumbprint to authorize a specific
account key to request certificates. Using the account key would allow that
key to request those certificates from any ACME supporting CA, not just
one. A binding could be introduced, but I guess CAA already solves that.

Regards, Niklas