Dear ACME experts,


We are developing an ACME server to help our customers purchase and manage 
commercial certificates from us. Such automation is becoming more important now 
that the maximum validity period has dropped to 200 days and will eventually 
drop to 47.



While we support free Let's Encrypt certs in various ways, we currently sell 
commercial certs only through our website. We resell them from 
https://www.thesslstore.com/, which sources them from the DigiCert and Sectigo 
CAs. Our ACME server is intended to be a wrapper around the existing reseller 
API provided by The SSL Store for certificate provisioning, allowing customers 
to use standard clients like certbot and simple-acme to purchase and reissue 
certs from us via External Account Binding.



The issue I'm encountering is that when DNS validation is chosen, we get 
"challenges" that must be published via TXT records on the root domain name 
rather than the _acme-challenge sub-host. E.g. for a cert on example.com, the 
CA will require us to publish a TXT token on example.com, not 
_acme-challenge.example.com. Unfortunately, the ACME dns-01 challenge type 
seems to have no way for the server to tell the client not to prepend the 
conventional _acme-challenge label when publishing the TXT record. There is 
also no way for us to tell the client to publish a CNAME rather than TXT 
record, as required by Sectigo. This issue prevents us from completing the 
domain validation (DV) process via our reseller API, because the CA will not 
find the DNS record they're expecting.



It's true that in most cases, we will control the domain's DNS, as we are the 
registrar of record and offer comprehensive DNS hosting; in that case, we could 
first validate the client's conventional _acme-challenge record and then turn 
around and publish the CA's requested record in the zone to complete validation 
on that side. But there will be cases where the customer uses a third-party DNS 
host, preventing us from publishing the needed record.



Do you know of any way around this issue, or any future RFC ACME extension 
proposal that might help? I'm aware of the http-01 challenge type, but The SSL 
Store reseller API doesn't provide consistent support for HTTP validation 
across all cert products.



Thanks,



Jordan Rieger | Software Development Manager | Webnames.ca









_______________________________________________
Acme mailing list -- [email protected]
To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]

Reply via email to