Ahh yes the: we can’t have self signed certificates for security reasons but also can’t open up the environment to the web, and we dont have our own CA server, trifecta.
Solution: awkward, manual, certificate import process from a 3rd party vendor.
Even if you have an internal CA, few appliances support this kind of automation. At best, they have an API, and you get to write that automation yourself for each appliance.
Knew a place where, for some devices, it was only available via a web interface. It was automated via WebDriver by a sysadmin that was losing his mind.
If you think it’s just too easy but people are still discussing it, please entertain the notion that you may have oversimplified the situation in your assessment and that as assumptions become clarified you may yet soon understand a horror that apple can’t quite grok.
Did we read the same article? DNS-01 challenges require updates to DNS. This means you need an API for your DNS. This means you now have to worry about DNS permissions in your application cert workflow. We’ve just massively increased blast radius! Or you could do it manually but that’s already failed.
All of this is straightforward with infrastructure-as-code. While I don’t struggle with that, I’ve watched devs and sysadmins both stare blankly at this kind of thing for days at a time.
I’m sorry, but have you ever needed to manage some certificates for a legacy system or something that isn’t just a simple public facing webserver?
Automation becomes complicated very quickly. And you don’t want to give DNS mutation access to all those systems to renew with DNS-01.
Ahh yes the: we can’t have self signed certificates for security reasons but also can’t open up the environment to the web, and we dont have our own CA server, trifecta.
Solution: awkward, manual, certificate import process from a 3rd party vendor.
Even if you have an internal CA, few appliances support this kind of automation. At best, they have an API, and you get to write that automation yourself for each appliance.
Knew a place where, for some devices, it was only available via a web interface. It was automated via WebDriver by a sysadmin that was losing his mind.
You can delegate to isolated nameservers with DNS-01, there’s no need to have control over the primary zone: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/technical-deep-dive-securing-automation-acme-dns-challenge-validation
Yes, and that is where we enter the complicated territories…
How complicated is it to have a CNAME? /s
If you think it’s just too easy but people are still discussing it, please entertain the notion that you may have oversimplified the situation in your assessment and that as assumptions become clarified you may yet soon understand a horror that apple can’t quite grok.
Did we read the same article? DNS-01 challenges require updates to DNS. This means you need an API for your DNS. This means you now have to worry about DNS permissions in your application cert workflow. We’ve just massively increased blast radius! Or you could do it manually but that’s already failed.
All of this is straightforward with infrastructure-as-code. While I don’t struggle with that, I’ve watched devs and sysadmins both stare blankly at this kind of thing for days at a time.