Hackers obtain counterfeit TLS certificates for Google and other large services | Hacker News Reader

Hackers obtain counterfeit TLS certificates for Google and other large services

arstechnica.com

113 pointscolinprince39 comments

This sounds like something that HPKP ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Public_Key_Pinning ) could have prevented and CAA records ( https://letsencrypt.org/docs/caa/ ) could not. But HPKP is deprecated.

CAA records (with ACME account bindings) can prevent this.

HPKP was deprecated because it was too dangerous to be deployed in production.

Not when you simply remove the CAA record from the DNS entry

That is a good point.

The problem is that there is no out-of-band mechanism for update like other devices.

If your CA certs are bad on your mobile application, you can push an out-of-band update via the device's app store.

If your CA certs are bad on a website you access via your browser, the means of updating them is... the browser. You can't get new certs without using a TLS connection you didn't want to trust anyway.

So looks like

1) Top level CC DNS entries were hacked

2) CAA entries were removed (I assume google had them -- they do now CAA 0 issue "pki.goog"

3) These were then used to verify issuing certificates against major CAs (letsencrypt etc) - for example by creating a new CNAME record for DNS verification

Looking at google.as specifically shows Let's Encrypt issuing a certificate on 2026-09-27

https://ctlogs.dev/search?q=google.as

Google normally issues certificates with "Google Trust Services", presumably their in house CA which all browsers trust, but the only way to limit issuing to Google is with the CAA record.

If you hijack DNS, you hijack certificate issuing. As several CAs exist with no business relationship to identify the real person asking for the certificate, you can do this anonymously. (If CAs required verification then you'd just have to chain this with the stolen credentials of someone who uses that CA so wouldn't be a major obstacle)

From what I can tell (and the article conflates this with the diginoir so implies it), this was NOT a compromise of a Certificate Authority

The affected country ccTLDs are:

AS: American Samoa

GH: Greenland

SL: Sierra Leone

.gh is Ghana, not Greenland

From the Google blog "Chrome's Response to Recent ccTLD Registry Hijacks":

"These incidents did not involve a compromise of Google’s systems; rather, attackers compromised the third-party ccTLDs, putting any domain ending in .gh, .sl, or .as at risk. During these hijacks, attackers modified authoritative DNS records and obtained unauthorized HTTPS certificates covering several Google domains, as well as domains belonging to other organizations."

So entire top level domain registries were compromised. Interesting times. Isn't there really any primary source on this?

Other recent submissions include the link to google's blog at https://blog.google/security/chromes-response-to-recent-cctl... :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49988253

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49981886

Nothing novel about this. In fact this is the reason why years ago Google stopped using ccTLDs to serve their website.

This seems like bullshit given certificate pinning and other countermeasures here. What am I missing ?

Is it TLDs lacking support for this?

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