HexBrain

Gratipay · Report #261706

Missing Certificate Authority Authorization rule

Duplicatestatus
5upvotes
9 Sept 2017disclosed

How it was found

Certificate Authority Authorization (supported by LetsEncrypt and other CAs) allows a domain owner to specify which Certificate Authorities should be allowed to issue certificates for the domain. All CAA-compliant certificate authorities should refuse to issue a certificate unless they are the CA of record for the target site. This helps reduce the threat of a bad guy tricking a Certificate Authority into issuing a phony certificate for your site.

The CAA rule is stored as a DNS resource record of type 257. You can view a domain’s CAA rule using a DNS lookup service:

https://dns.google.com/query?name=gratipay.com&type=257&dnssec=true

Gratipay should set a CAA record to help prevent misissuance of a certificate for its domains.

This report was disclosed publicly on HackerOne and belongs to its author and the program. See the original