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Comment by jb613 | Hacker News Reader

1) CAA tries to address the threat of attacker getting a cert issued for your domain - to carry out such an attack inherently requires taking over your DNS record or your domain account - if they can do this then they can also reconfigure your CAA record.

2) CAA requires the CA to perform additional operation (retrieve and check that DNS record) - not all of the 300-600+ CA's will do this - all it takes is 1 CA and the attacker will get his fraudulent cert from that CA.

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1) No, it is not necessary to have full control over your domain's DNS to obtain a certificate. There are various domain validation mechanisms. Having full control over the HTTP server (as mentioned in the article) would be sufficient, as would having access to certain email addresses associated with your domain.

2) I don't know why you're telling me this - it's not related to either your original post, or my reply. I'm quite aware that CAA is only really effective if it is mandatory (in fact I've mentioned it in a sibling comment a couple of hours ago).

>CAA requires the CA to perform additional operation (retrieve and check that DNS record) - not all of the 300-600+ CA's will do this - all it takes is 1 CA and the attacker will get his fraudulent cert from that CA.

CAA seems like another good step that the browsers can demand after a CA fucks up - like google has mandated that some CAs publish Certificate Transparency logs after they've mis-issued a cert, they should also be requiring CAA on threat of being revoked from the browser's trust lists.

Yeah - in theory, but in reality the browsers are reluctant because of all the other sites that a CA has issued certs for - no browser wants to be singled out for blocking some other non-related sites.

For what it's worth, my impression is that CAA will be mandated by the CA/Browser forum at some point. But, indeed, that's the main weakness of CAA—it requires that substantially all CAs support it.

There's too many paying entities to appease - not just hundreds of CA's but various browser vendors as well. Either MUSTs will be changed to SHOULDs - or fragmentation of the CA/Browser body itself.

Look no further than at some of the past transgressions browsers let CA's get away with.

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