On Thu, Aug 25, 2016 at 5:41 PM, Andrew Ayer <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Thu, 25 Aug 2016 13:57:25 -0400
> Daniel McCarney <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > In the earlier "Re: [Acme] Preconditions" thread[2] Andrew Ayer seems
> > to agree
> > that there should be only one issuance method to simplify client
> > behaviours, though he favours proactive issuance instead of
> > on-finalization issuance. While
> > it saves a round-trip message I'm not sure that this alone is
> > convincing enough
> > to choose proactive issuance as the one issuance method.
>
> There's another reason I prefer proactive issuance: I think the server
> should automatically issue a new certificate if an application's
> current certificate is about to expire and its authorizations are still
> valid.  This lets you create an application from a central
> location with access to your account key, and then have your TLS
> frontends/load balancers make unauthenticated GETs to keep the
> certificate up-to-date.  I think this is essential to make short-lived
> certificates work robustly, but it's useful even with longer-lived
> certificates.  I went into further detail in my previous email[1].
>

One issue that was briefly discussed at the meeting is whether the
Application object should have a "certificates" array member instead of a
"certificate" string member.  That would allow this sort of re-issuance
without erasing the old URL.

Andrew: Is that something you think we need?


Requiring an explicit action to issue would mean you'd need some
> process somewhere to request issuance when a cert is about
> to expire.  This process would need access to your account key (so it
> should not run on your frontend servers), and if it fails your
> certificates stop renewing.
>
> I understand the bulk issuance use case you describe.  Could it be
> accomplished instead by a boolean field in the application to
> enable/disable the application?  Certificates would only be issued when
> the application is enabled.  Bulk issuers could pre-create
> authorizations in the disabled state, and enable them when ready to
> issue.
>

I was actually thinking that Daniel's use case sounded a lot like what EKR
was describing as his use case for bringing back the new-authz flow.
Namely, instead of proactively submitting new-app requests for a bunch of
certs, the client would submit new-authz requests for all the names they
might want on certs, then submit new-app requests when they're ready to get
certs.  So basically what you do with LE now, except "new-app" instead of
"new-cert".

Daniel: That change is in this PR:

https://github.com/ietf-wg-acme/acme/pull/165

Does that look like it would address your use case?

--Richard



>
> Regards,
> Andrew
>
> [1] https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/acme/current/msg01160.html
>
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