Unfortunately with dns-persist-01 including account information in the DNS record itself, that's a bit of a show stopper for me. If/when account information changes, that means DNS records need changing and getting clients to update their DNS records (for any reason) has long been a pain.
While "usernames" are not generally protected to the same degree as credentials, they do matter and act as an important gate to even know about before a real attack can commence. This also provides the ability to associate random found credentials back to the sites you can now issue certificates for if they're using the same account. This is free scope expansion for any breach that occurs.
I guarantee sites like Shodan will start indexing these IDs on all domains they look at to provide those reverse lookup services.
I think most users depend on automation that creates their accounts, so they never have to deal with it. But now, you need to propagate some credential to validate your account ownership to the ACME provider. I would have liked to see some conversation about that in this announcement.
I'm not familiar with Let's Encrypt's authentication model. If they don't have token creation that can be limited by target domain, but I expect you'll need to create separate accounts for each of your target domains, or else anything with that secret can create a cert for any domain your account controls.
Why? ACME accounts have credentials so that the ACME client can authenticate against the certificate issuer, and ACME providers require the placement of a DNS record or a .well-known HTTP endpoint to verify that the account is authorized to act upon the demands of whoever owns the domain.
If either your ACME credentials leak out or, even worse, someone manages to place DNS records or hijack your .well-known endpoint, you got far bigger problems at hand than someone being able to mis-issue SSL certificates under your domain name.
Being able to distribute self-hostable software to users that can be deployed onto a VM and made operational literally within 5 minutes is a big selling point. Domain registration & DNS are a massive pain to deal with at the novice end of the spectrum. You can combine this with things like https://checkip.amazonaws.com to build properly turnkey solutions.
That should be TAI, right? Is that really correct or do they actually mean unix timestamps (those shift with leap seconds unlike TAI which is actually just the number of seconds that have passed since 1970001Z)?
In the meantime, if you use bind as your authoritative nameserver, you can limit an hmac-secret to one TXT record, so each webserver that uses rfc2136 for certificate renewals is only capable of updating its specific record:
key "bob.acme." {
algorithm hmac-sha512;
secret "blahblahblah";
};
key "joe.acme." {
algorithm hmac-sha512;
secret "blahblahblah2";
};
zone "example.com" IN {
type master;
file "/var/lib/bind/example.com.zone";
update-policy {
grant bob.acme. name _acme-challenge.bob.acme.example.com. TXT;
grant joe.acme. name _acme-challenge.joe.acme.example.com. TXT;
};
key-directory "/var/lib/bind/keys-acme.example.com";
dnssec-policy "acme";
inline-signing yes;
};
export LE_CONFIG_HOME="/etc/acme-sh/"
export NSUPDATE_SERVER="${YOUR_NS_ADDR}"
export NSUPDATE_KEY="/var/lib/bob-nsupdate.key"
export NSUPDATE_KEY_NAME="bob.acme."
export NSUPDATE_ZONE="acme.example.com."
acme.sh --issue --server letsencrypt -d 'bob.example.com' \
--certificate-profile shortlived \
--days 6 \
--dns dns_nsupdateThank you so much to all inolved!
The ACME account credentials are also accessible by the same renewal pipelines that has the DNS API credentials, so this does not provide any new isolation.
~It's also not quite clear how to revoke this challenge, and how domain expiration deal with this. The DNS record contents should have been at least the HMAC of the account key, the FQDN, and something that will invalidate if the domain is transferred somewhere else. The leaf DNSSEC key would have been perfect, but DNSSEC key rotation is also quite broken, so it wouldn't play nice.~
Is there a way to limit the challenge types with CAA records? You can limit it by an account number, and I believe that is the most tight control you have so far.
---
Edit: thanks to the replies to this comment, I learned that this would provide invalidation simply by removing the DNS record, and that the DNS records are checked at renewal time with a much shorter validation TTL.
CAs can cache the record lookup for no longer than 10 days. After 10 days, they have to check it again. If the record is gone, which would be expected if the domain has expired or been transferred, then the authorization is no longer valid.
(I would have preferred a much shorter limit, like 8 hours, but 10 days is a lot better than the current 398 day limit for the original ACME DNS validation method.)
CAs were already doing something like this (CNAME to a dns server controlled by the CA), so there was interest from everyone involved to standardize and decide on what the rules should be.
To revoke the record, delete it from DNS. Let’s Encrypt queries authoritative nameservers with caches capped at 1 minute. Authorizations that have succeeded will soon be capped at 7 hours, though that’s independent of this challenge.
And many providers don't. (Even big ones that are supposedly competent like Cloudflare.)
And basically everyone who uses granular API keys are storing a cleartext key, which is no better and possibly worse than storing a credential for an ACME account.
Here, certbot runs in Docker in the intranet, and on a VPS I have a custom-built nameserver to which all the _acme-challenge are redirected to via NS records.
The system in the intranet starts certbot, makes it pass it the token-domain-pair from letsencrypt, it then sends those pairs to the nameserver which then attaches the token to a TXT record for that domain, so that the DNS reply can send this to letsencrypt when they request it.
All that will be gone and I thank you for that! You add as much value to the internet as Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap.
`certbot register` followed by `certbot show_account` is how you'd do this with certbot.
Pasting a challenge string once and letting its continued presence prove continued ownership of a domain is a great step forward. But I agree with others that there is absolutely no reason to expose account numbers; it should be a random ID associated with the account in Let's Encrypt's database.
As a workaround, you should probably make a new account for each domain.
Why not using some public/private key auth where the dns contains a public key and the requesting server uses the private key to sign the cert request? This would decouple the authorization from the actual account. It would not reveal the account's identity. It could be used with multiple account (useful for a wildcard on the DNS plus several independent systems requesting certs for subdomains).
Prior to this accounts were nearly pointless as proof of control was checked every time so people (rightfully) just threw away the account key LE generated for them. Now if you use PERSIST you have to keep it around and deploy it to servers you want to be able to issue certs.
/usr/bin/letsencrypt renew -n --agree-tos --email me@example.com --keep-until-expiring
Will I need to change that? Will I need to manually add custom DNS entries to all my domains?
PS To add, compared to dealing with some paid certificate services, LetsEncrypt has been a dream.
Years ago, I had a really fubar shell script for generating the DNS-01 records on my own (non-cloud) run authoritative nameserver. It "worked," but its reliability was highly questionable.
I like this DNS-PERSIST fixes that.
But I don't understand why they chose to include the account as a plain-text string in the DNS record. Seems they could have just as easily used a randomly generated key that wouldn't mean anything to anyone outside Let's Encrypt, and without exposing my account to every privacy-invasive bot and hacker.
If you’re worried about correlating between domains, then yes just make multiple accounts.
There is an email field in ACME account registration but we don’t persist that since we dropped sending expiry emails.
We then can just staple the Persist DNS key to the certificate itself.
And then we just need to cut out the middleman and add a new IETF standard for browsers to directly validate the certificates, as long as they confirm the DNS response using DNSSEC.
So why not cut out the middleman?
(And the answer right now is "legacy compatibility")