Re: [Acme] Issuing certificates based on Simple HTTP challenges

Stephen Farrell <stephen.farrell@cs.tcd.ie> Wed, 16 December 2015 02:26 UTC

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From: Stephen Farrell <stephen.farrell@cs.tcd.ie>
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Subject: Re: [Acme] Issuing certificates based on Simple HTTP challenges
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Hiya,

On 16/12/15 01:44, Julian Dropmann wrote:
> The target users are server admins right? In order to set up their
> services, they should be familiar with DNS. 

Familiar with != has write access to.

In my university, I have root on 24U of boxen with zero write
access to the routers, f/w, DNS or mail servers, meaning that
for 13 years I couldn't get the two that are publicly visible
web servers certified by any CA any time I checked, which was
admittedly not that often.

ACME (via LE in that case, but I've no allegiance) fixed that
in a couple of minutes. And those minutes didn't require deep
knowledge of anything - relative ignorance would have worked
just as well, which is fantastic:-)

And before someone argues, sure there are other situations but
our goal here is to define a protocol that works in the most
common of those cases as easily as possible and that supports
automation.

> To use the current
> mechanism they already need to configure the A record. 

Not necessarily the same admins. That much is pretty obvious
and unless someone has demographics about how many sysadmins
have what access to what (which would be great!) I think this
is repetitive argument and therefore pointless.

Cheers,
S.


> So whats the
> big difference? Instead of an A record they need to use an SRV
> record. So technically only the record type changes. Nothing else.
> How is that even a higher level of interaction?
> 
> There are other services requiring admins to create DNS records
> (Google Apps for example). They are being used.