For someone who runs a small personal website and uses LE to secure this + some web exposed services, could you explain how this is different/better than acme-dns-certbot?
WebPKI also suffers from an inability to properly do delegation. It's not possible for me to create an intermediary certificate valid only for *.mycompany.com
If I want to use WebPKI, I have to either expose every host inside my company to everyone (via CT transparency logs) or use a wildcard certificate. And wildcard certs allow attackers to impersonate anything within my domain, if they get access to just one host.
X.509 technically supports name constraints ( https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5280#section-4.2.1.10 ), but its implementation was inconsistent. In particular, some implementations did not apply it to the Common Name. Fortunately, Common Name is on the path to deprecation.
CT logs do allow enumeration, but avoiding that is just security through obscurity. WebPKI is intended for publicly-accessible hosts, so hopefully you already have some kind of firewall in place to protect them! If you want to avoid enumeration of internal-only hosts: just use your own self-signed root cert. CT logs are a crucial part of protecting against rogue CAs, so don't expect that to go away any time soon.
With ACME most of the delegation issues have pretty much been solved. Publicly-accessible hosts can easily get a cert - if and only if the domain resolves to that host. Want even stricter enforcement? Nobody's stopping you from writing an ACME proxy which only forwards requests from known-good hosts to LE & friends.
cyberax|2 months ago
WebPKI also suffers from an inability to properly do delegation. It's not possible for me to create an intermediary certificate valid only for *.mycompany.com
If I want to use WebPKI, I have to either expose every host inside my company to everyone (via CT transparency logs) or use a wildcard certificate. And wildcard certs allow attackers to impersonate anything within my domain, if they get access to just one host.
X.509 technically supports name constraints ( https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5280#section-4.2.1.10 ), but its implementation was inconsistent. In particular, some implementations did not apply it to the Common Name. Fortunately, Common Name is on the path to deprecation.
crote|2 months ago
With ACME most of the delegation issues have pretty much been solved. Publicly-accessible hosts can easily get a cert - if and only if the domain resolves to that host. Want even stricter enforcement? Nobody's stopping you from writing an ACME proxy which only forwards requests from known-good hosts to LE & friends.