[cabfpub] CAA Proposal

[Phillip]

The BR already requires CAs to maintain a 'High risk request' list. All CAA does is to define an additional mechanism that can be used by domains to self advertise themselves as requiring processing as high risk.

On the compliance front, I am pretty sure we can wire up pretty much any of CT or other transparency scheme to CAA and get good measurement of compliance. But if we try to wait till everything is in place before we start we will never start.



On Jun 7, 2013, at 5:32 PM, Jeremy Rowley wrote:

> Although I am starting to like the concept of CAA, I think this is an improper way to implement a CAA requirement.  If a CA already has rigorous validation practices and can accurately identify the request as originating from the proper entity, I’m not sure that additional checks are necessary.
>  
> If we plan to implement CAA in the Forum, we should develop a discernible standard that can be used to measure compliance.  In fact, perhaps the RFC should be revised prior to the Forum’s adoption to identify what additional verification requirements should be considered necessary before issuance of a certificate.  That way the Forum has a basis for setting the additional checks and CAs will have a better understanding of how to comply.
>  
> Jeremy
>  
> From: public-bounces at cabforum.org [mailto:public-bounces at cabforum.org] On Behalf Of Phillip
> Sent: Friday, June 07, 2013 10:10 AM
> To: public at cabforum.org
> Subject: [cabfpub] CAA Proposal
>  
> Following up on the CAA threads, I would like to propose the following (subject to discussion):
>  
> 1) CABForum endorse the publication of CAA records by domain name owners to mitigate the risk of issue of certificates in response to an unauthorized or fraudulent request.
>  
> 2) The Basic requirements be updated to add a requirement that CAs state their policy for use of CAA records in their CPS.
>  
> "A CA MUST state its policy for processing CAA records as defined in RFC 6844"
>  
>  
> Rationale: 
>  
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6844
>  
> To be compliant with the RFC, a CA MUST comply with the requirements of section 4:
>  
> Before issuing a certificate, a compliant CA MUST check for
>    publication of a relevant CAA Resource Record set.  If such a record
>    set exists, a CA MUST NOT issue a certificate unless the CA
>    determines that either (1) the certificate request is consistent with
>    the applicable CAA Resource Record set or (2) an exception specified
>    in the relevant Certificate Policy or Certification Practices
>    Statement applies.
>  
> A CA can be minimally compliant with the specification by simply publishing a statement that says that they retrieve and process CAA records for each request and then grant an automatic exception in every case.
>  
> This is deliberate because there is a peculiar edge case in which the Domain Name owner does not control their DNS publication infrastructure and the party that does inserts a spurious CAA record to limit competition. It also avoided the need for theological debates on what is and is not a public delegation point.
>  
> The point of CAA is to benefit CAs by reducing the cost of detecting potential fraudulent applications and mitigating the risk of issuing a certificate. But as with any other validation check, the response to a request that is non-consistent is not going to be to kick the request back to manual processing. There is going to be a person in the loop making enquiries. Either the CAA record is spurious and the CA wants to get it changed so that they can take the business or they have just detected an unauthorized request which they are going to want to look at an analyze and study.
>  
> A CA could write a CPS statement that says they look at CAA records and then ignore them completely but that would not look good. I think it rather more likely that it would say something like they have some sort of process for determining that CAA records do not represent the intention of the Domain Owner and publish a list of domains they will ignore CAA records from. This might include top-level domains like .com etc. But the fact that CAs have the option of ignoring the CAA records is probably sufficient to deter an attack.

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