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If the CA is compromised, can’t they just bypass ACME verification and generate a cert for your domain anyway?
by paulgb 3y ago
If the CA is compromised, can’t they just bypass ACME verification and generate a cert for your domain anyway?
- mholt 3y agoYes, but with serious consequences (it would go into public transparency logs, at least for CAs in most public root stores). If the CA can access your private key, then it can reuse (or worse, redistribute) it without anyone knowing.
- Vecr 3y agoYeah, but that's more likely to be noticed in cert transparency and by the website operator, as there's either a duplicate cert in the log or the website server does not work.
- dspillett 3y agoThe CA isn't directly compromised so a third party couldn't generate any arbitrary certificate this way. Essentially though, assuming my understanding is correct, it would allow them to be a man-in-the-middle and take copies of the keys & certificates used by this tool, allowing them to use keys and certificates generated by that tool. Also, if such a tool is run by root (bad practise, but not uncommon practise) or other significantly privileged user, they potentially have access to far more.