ACME currently has unauthenticated GETs for some resources. This was originally discussed in January 2015[1]. We decided to put all sensitive data in the account resource and consider all GET resources public, with a slant towards transparency.

Adam Roach recently pointed out in his Area Director review that even when the contents of GET URLs aren’t sensitive, their correlation may be. For instance, some CAs might consider the grouping of certificates by account to be sensitive.

Richard Barnes proposes[2] to change all GETs to POSTs (except directory and new-nonce). This will be a breaking change. Clients that were compatible with previous drafts, informally called ACMEv1 and ACMEv2, will not be compatible with a draft that mandates POSTs everywhere. It will be a painful change, since the ecosystem just started switching to ACMEv2, which looked to be near-final.

I think this is the right path forwards. ACME will be a simpler, better protocol long-term if all requests are authenticated. However, if we’re taking this path we should aim to come to consensus and land the final spec quickly to reduce uncertainty for ACME client implementers.

[1] https://github.com/letsencrypt/acme-spec/pull/48#issuecomment-70169712
[2] https://github.com/ietf-wg-acme/acme/pull/445/files

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