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Comment by nbadg

For anyone else who didn't have "remote perspectives" in their personal technical lexicon: this refers to performing the ACME challenge/response check when validating the domain of a certificate signing request from multiple physical locations, and therefore via multiple physical network routes, in order to make network-level attacks more difficult.

For example, if you were validating example.com, you'd need to set up some response to the ACME challenge somewhere, either through direct DNS-based validation (DNS-01, DNS-PERSIST-01) or through a server running at the resolved A/AAAA IP address for example.com (HTTP-01, TLS-ALPN-01). In all cases, when a CA goes to validate your challenge response, it relies both upon DNS and upon the network integrity between the CA's datacenters and your DNS and/or app servers. Both of these can be subverted, eg via BGP attack, to allow an attacker to replace a DNS response, re-route the destination IP address to a different server, etc, at which point they can inject their own challenge response, and therefore issue their own (unauthorized) certificates.

Multi-perspective validation means that the CA validates your challenge response from multiple datacenters on different networks instead of just one, such that a hypothetical network attack would have to target multiple independent networks in order to successfully issue their unauthorized certificate.

More info:

https://letsencrypt.org/2020/02/19/multi-perspective-validat...

https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/multi-perspective-valida...

parent nbadg 13 days ago

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