Domain Providers and CAA

Certificate Authorities are not the Problem

To increase the security of SSL/TLS encryption in the internet, website administrators can set Certificate Authority Authorization (CAA) records. These DNS records determine which certificate authority (CA) is allowed to issue certificates for this domain. Since September 8th, it is mandatory for CAs to check the existence of a ACC record and comply to its content.

Currently there are still some problems such as CAs that do not check the CAA records at all. However this is not the biggest issue: Many domain provider have not yet updated their software to enable setting CAA records. Therefore administrators simply cannot set the CAA records.

How can I set CAA records?

To increase the security for your website, go to your DNS provider’s configuration website and choose to create a new CAA record. To only allow letsencrypt to issue certificates for your domain example.org, use the following record:

Name             Type    Value
example.org.     CAA     0 issue “letsencrypt.org”

Check out our knowledge base for more information.

Verify the record

To verify whether the CAA record is set correctly, you can use our free web application security scanner. It will show you the following message in case that the CAA record is not set: