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by temprature 3263 days ago
No, why should there be? If you own a domain name you can get a DV cert for that domain name. It's that simple.

There shouldn't be any policing at all of which domain names are allowed to have certificates.

1 comments

I would agree that it would not be scalable or fair to LetsEncrypt to police all of them. Would it be feasible to maybe just police the top 50 or top 100 financial institutions?
All public CAs are obliged (by the Baseline Requirements agreed with Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft etc.) to operate a "high risk" list of names for which they will do additional manual checks. For Let's Encrypt the effect of requiring "manual checks" is that you can't get a certificate because they only do automatic issuances.

However the BRs deliberately don't say what should or should not be on the list. Is Gmail as important as a Russian bank? Probably not if you're Russian!

Also of course CAs are not exactly rushing to reveal everything on their lists, for much the same reason you don't get told every security measure in place at your local bank.

Finally, bad guys will react to any such restriction, if they can't get paypal.example they'll try paypa1.example, not allowed that? How about paypa1-web.example? Even the rules LE have in place today cause problems for somebody a few times per month because their South American trucking business has the same initials as a German bank or whatever.