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tgsovlerkhgsel 3 days ago

The CAA whitelist is still enforced by the CAs themselves, so a malicious, compromised or buggy CA could ignore it. You still have to monitor CT. CAA mostly does two things:

1. It makes sure that nobody accidentally issues a cert from another CA (giving you better control, avoiding the "an engineer used a different CA" scenario, and meaning that if you see a cert from another CA, you know it's something Very Not Good).

2. It gives you a chance that an attacker able to bypass some but not all controls on a crappy CA won't be able to use that CA to get a cert for your site (if they don't manage to somehow also bypass the CAA check).

I'm not sure whether CAA would have prevented this CA from issuing for this domain. I think it's more likely than not, but not certain, that it would have helped in this case.

jchw 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Unfortunately the best solution there was for this problem was probably HPKP, which fell out of favor years ago. Would be nice to have some kind of solution for this some day; I think it would compliment CT very well.

mcpherrinm 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

CAA plus DNSSEC also provides significant defense against some types of attacks on domain validation.