What is Certificate Authority Authorization (CAA)? Should I Use It?

by sslstreet admin


Posted on April 07,2018 02:18 pm


The SSL Street

About CAA

CAA is a security measure or in simpler language, it is a standard that is designed to basically protect websites and help in preventing unauthorized SSL certificate. Certificate Authorities (CAs) is the powerful entity whose job is to make sure that every single SSL certificate is authorized by using different methods of domain validation. It is normally done by linking the particular SSL certificate with particular website using a particular domain. But the CA should be listed as an authorized issuer of certificate. As CAA specify which CAs are genuine and are allowed to issue certificate for a domain, it helps in preventing or minimizing chances of hacking or misusing SSL certificate.

How to create CAA record

In order to create a CAA record, DNS (Domain Name System) provider has to be contacted. List of CAs that you prefer should be provided so that unauthorized CAs can not issue SSL Certificates to your domain. If you did not provide with your preferred list of CAs, it automatically gives right to every single CA to issue SSL certificate to your domain, which can results in misuse of your domain by any other party.

Benefits of CAA

  • It helps in preventing illegal or unauthorized issuance of comodo SSL certificate.

  • Organization are also helped by limiting CAs they use.

  • The site owners are also benefited as they can now specify which Certificate Authorities (CAs) have the authority to issue SSL certificate to their domain name.

  • All the CAs have to check for the authenticity before issuing SSL certificate.

Need for CAA

As benefits of Certificate Authority Authorization (CAA) are clear, next thing that hits our minds is “Do I need CAA?”. The answer is very clear…YES, we very much need CAA. As we know CAA records are used to check the authenticity of CAs i.e. which CA is authorized to issue SSL certificate as well as it provides immense amount of security from hackers. It also gives rights to the domain owner to exclude particular CA. CA can’t issue any Comodo SSL certificate without authentication. In other words, we can say that CAA can bring down the risk of issuing the SSL certificates by unauthorized Certificate Authorities (CAs).

For any domain, CA can issue certificate and with increase in HTTPS, there is an increase in SSL certificates. To put a control over this, a powerful approach was required. An approach that could not only decrease the risk but put a stop on miss-issuance of SSL certificates. CAA is designed to stop unauthorized issuance of SSL certificates.