Comment by arianvanp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arianvanp | Hacker News Reader

I ran into a similarly weird issue with CloudFlare. This post made me check my domain that I recently bought.

I bought the domain passkey.exchange through Cloudflare on 12 April and I didn't set up ANYTHING on it. No DNS records. Nothing. I didn't touch it since

Yet. Exactly at the purchase time. 3 certificates where added to the certificate transparency log:

2 from LetsEncrypt and one from Google. How?

https://crt.sh/?q=passkey.exchange

The only explanation that i have is that Cloudflare is doing some kind of integration testing after you buy a domain from them on Google Cloud and LetsEncrypt before giving you the domain.

But that means they have some private key somewhere for 90 days. Across two different CAs..

Or I have really bad memory. Set up some Infrastructure on Google Cloud and then deprovisioned it again and removed all DNS records.

Or I was hacked.

It's really strange.

Edit: digging further it must've been Cloudflare.

The google cert has

Not Before: Apr 12 22:01:51 2024 GMT

My invoice is dated 22:49 UTC. One hour after the cert was issued?

Yes, Cloudflare controls your DNS and they advertise setting up HTTPS for you. If they'd wait until you added a DNS record that's routed through them, which they are by default, then that'd be poor user experience.

The timestamp difference is probably just Google backdating the certificate by an hour or 30 minutes to deal with clients whose clocks lag behind.

What method do they use to get the certificate? I'd guess ACME DNS-01 challenge, but that means they are setting DNS records you didn't explicitly ask for. Getting a TLS certificate is pretty quick, I'd probably prefer to wait 10 seconds versus having unexpected DNS records.

(edit: although I'm a DevOps engineer and I wrote my own subdomain registration service, so my preference will certainly not match others).

Many (most?) registrars add DNS you didn't explicitly ask for, like an A record on the root that says "this domain was purchased from Namecheap" or whatever.

Do you know of a registrar that doesn't do that?

DNSimple doesn’t do that (https://dnsimple.com/)

I've never used a registrar that does do that.

How would you know? It's not like those records are displayed in their configuration panel and the only way to request TXT records for e.g. a subdomain is to know that subdomain even exists ahead of time.

If we're still talking about TLS certs, the transparency log has that info (mentioned in the article). I also assume this thread is talking about the domain and any subdomains you're actually using. What would the reason be of setting TXT records for unguessable subdomains?

My comment was regarding DNS records, since this subthread switched to talking about DNS 2 comments up:

> Many (most?) registrars add DNS you didn't explicitly ask for

This relates to TLS since DNS records can be used to request a TLS certificate, but yes, those show in the certificate transparency log, so that you can check. But it won't tell you about other DNS records that may be used for various other purposes.

Did you have any purposes in mind? An A record for the apex of the domain would be easy to find with dig or any other DNS client. I agree with the hypothetical though, your DNS provider can set records that you didn't request, could hide them in the console, and detecting these would be hard in the general case.

Not really, the point is more that you wouldn't easily find out if they did that.

When you buy a domain, they ask you which nameservers the domain should point to, right? They won't be able to do this shenanigan if you point it to nameservers outside of their control.

Correct, though usually they don't ask during signup. They tend to default to their own nameservers, then let you change it afterwards.

In the case of cloudflare, it means not being able to use the majority of their services.

Actually if you use Cloudflare Registrar, you must use Cloudflare DNS. That's the deal. "We provide registration services with absolutely no markup, you use our DNS for that domain".

> that means they are setting DNS records you didn't explicitly ask for.

If you make a CAA record on Cloudflare then they add extra invisible CAA records which authorize the ~4 different CAs they use for CDN certificates. They really assume you're using the whole stack, not just DNS.

> but that means they are setting DNS records you didn't explicitly ask for

Sure, that's what you're paying them for. Cloudflare is not a "dumb" domain registrar, they are an integrated service.

> Getting a TLS certificate is pretty quick

Most of the time, yes. Sometimes there are outages or whatever. It makes sense to just get it done ASAP.

Distributing that TLS certificate to their edge network may take some time as well, and who knows what other internal prep they need to do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com