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Comment by apitman

2 days ago

IP certs improve a niche but interesting use case for me. I run a domain registrar that implements a simple OAuth2 protocol[0] for delegating domains/subdomains. I also have an open source tunneling tool called boringproxy that implements the client side of this protocol[1].

boringproxy needs to provide a callback redirect_uri to the oauth server in order to retrieve it's token, which it can then use for setting DNS records. However, it can't provide an HTTPS endpoint until it can set up those DNS records and get a cert. Chicken/egg. Currently the spec requires the server to implement a `GET /temp-domain` endpoint which creates a DNS record like 157-245-231-242.example.com which points at the client's IP. This lets boringproxy bootstrap a secure OAuth2 callback endpoint.

IP certs would remove an entire step from this process.

[0]: https://github.com/takingnames/namedrop-protocol-spec

[1]: This is actually broken in boringproxy at the moment, but there's a demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hf72-fYTts