also sprach Viktor Dukhovni <postfix-us...@dukhovni.org> [2017-09-18 00:31 
+0200]:
> So your certral system generates the keys, and obtains the LE
> certificates on behalf of the far-flung hosts?  And then pushes
> these keys to the hosts over an SSH tunnel?
> 
> Is that only for the initial key issuance?  And then each host
> rotates the certs independently of the central system using the
> existing key to authenticate to LE?

No, they're all managed centrally and pushed regularly.

> I am curious why you want to rotate the submission TLS client
> keys. If you are able to centrally push keys to the hosts, why
> bother with a CA at all?  Why not generate a self-signed key+cert,
> store the fingerprint in a database, and leave LE out of it?  The
> key would not change for the lifetime of the host.

This is a very good question, and I'm blushing a bit having to admit
that I haven't thought of that. Heck, Debian even gives you a free
snakeoil cert on installation. I'll totally have to look into it.
Thanks for the brainfood.

> DNSSEC helps with having CAA records that are difficult to MiTM,
> and protectst the DNS challenge protocol, but I don't whether it
> is possible to disable bootstrapping over weaker email challenges
> and/or control over port 80.

This is another excellent point I'lll bring up with the LE folks: if
I go through lengths securing my DNS chain for their challenges,
I'd like to be able to lock my account onto that, a bit like HSTS.
At the moment, I have to assume, however, that LE wouldn't actually
care if I requested a cert renewal with a http-01 when I've used
dns-01 in the past.

Anyway, this is getting vastly off-topic… sorry about that.

> I should also note that with LE and certbot's "--csr" option you
> can renew LE certificates *without* changing the public key.  In
> which case the public key fingerprint is stable, and need not
> change.

Hm, yes, I knew that, but I only just found out that postfix 2.9+
can do check_ccert_access based on the public key fingerprint (not
the certificate fingerprint). So that's that then…

> The reason I am asking them is not because I've decided to not
> implement access by subject name (though given the SAN situation,
> and the potentially large number of SANs to test, the feature is
> tricky to implement fully and correctly).

Indeed, it's not as easy as I had imagined. OTOH, it would not be
unfathomable to iterate all SANs and check each against an access
map. For sanity, one could introduce an upper bound. And it's
a policy decision whether the final decision would be the min or the
max of the set of sub-decisions…

Thanks a lot for this enlightening exchange.

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