> The issuing was detected almost immediacy thanks to CT
Which means that the risk to you or I or the general public is low.
But FWIW: it also tends to argue that this is the aftermath of a coordinated, targeted attack against a single high value target (or at most a small set of targets they could hit within the window). The attacker knew they had a gun with only one bullet, and we're just hearing the muzzle report.
Solutions for Google and instagram and whatever are trivial.
General solutions are tricker, and it’s good that Google limits its “special” case. When bbc.com or al jazzera or cnbc or whatever is hacked that’s a problem that is only solved by generic solutions.
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.
You can't "simply" do that: a long cache period pins CAA. Of course that makes it the same, and with the same problems.
What I'd like to see is the ability to use and utilise multiple TLS certificates and host keys on the same session so that all the keys could be rotated/phased in-band with cross-signing providing the authority.
Seeing any mere change in the signers faster than (say) 30 days should allow the browser/client-stack to generate a warning that "google.com may be actively under attack please call this number on the old certificate, codeword banana-alpha-lima-lima-sigma". No need to cross-publish the keys, just cross-sign and don't forget what you've seen previously.
The browser would be able to take policy of simply never trust a certificate whose signer has changed (since phasing is possible), and it wouldn't then need to consult more public oracles (DNS, certificate transparency, etc, that leak privacy).
I'd also like to get that webauthn hooked back into TLS client certificates: If we had 1997 again instead of passkeys that also would've stopped this.
> The browser would be able to take policy of simply never trust a certificate whose signer has changed
This assumes that the signer's keys can't be compromised, and re-introduces the issues of key pinning that the WebPKI community has been pushing very hard to eliminate from its dependents. I don't think it's a workable solution.
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
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
A central authority can give each of us a chunk of a 128-bit address space and then we can route peer to peer based on shortest paths. Wait...
Did you know you're allowed to own an IP address block without making it publicly routable? They will have to periodically call you to make sure you're still using it, but it's otherwise allowed.
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?
> These incidents did not involve a compromise of Google’s systems
But a compromise of Google's users.
I think we are potentially being told Google has domain names but no employees in those countries. This otherwise sounds quite implausible, and I don't know enough to say Google is lying.
certificate pinning is generally not recommended and wouldn't work in browsers that use the browsers/operating system's root CA store anyways. CAAs can be edited by the one who controls the domain's DNS records.
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.
Only if someone had visited that site before, and it’s insanely risky and would damage far more sites than would save.
The issuing was detected almost immediacy thanks to CT, and as we move to shorter certificate lifetimes the impact is continually reducing.
The CAA record in dns is a weak link though.
> The issuing was detected almost immediacy thanks to CT
Which means that the risk to you or I or the general public is low.
But FWIW: it also tends to argue that this is the aftermath of a coordinated, targeted attack against a single high value target (or at most a small set of targets they could hit within the window). The attacker knew they had a gun with only one bullet, and we're just hearing the muzzle report.
Well, for Google specifically (and others who have opted in), this has been hard coded in some browsers before the first visit.
Solutions for Google and instagram and whatever are trivial.
General solutions are tricker, and it’s good that Google limits its “special” case. When bbc.com or al jazzera or cnbc or whatever is hacked that’s a problem that is only solved by generic solutions.
Hence why I said "for Google specifically".
Visiting google damages you anyway.
+1
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.
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
You can't "simply" do that: a long cache period pins CAA. Of course that makes it the same, and with the same problems.
What I'd like to see is the ability to use and utilise multiple TLS certificates and host keys on the same session so that all the keys could be rotated/phased in-band with cross-signing providing the authority.
Seeing any mere change in the signers faster than (say) 30 days should allow the browser/client-stack to generate a warning that "google.com may be actively under attack please call this number on the old certificate, codeword banana-alpha-lima-lima-sigma". No need to cross-publish the keys, just cross-sign and don't forget what you've seen previously.
The browser would be able to take policy of simply never trust a certificate whose signer has changed (since phasing is possible), and it wouldn't then need to consult more public oracles (DNS, certificate transparency, etc, that leak privacy).
I'd also like to get that webauthn hooked back into TLS client certificates: If we had 1997 again instead of passkeys that also would've stopped this.
> The browser would be able to take policy of simply never trust a certificate whose signer has changed
This assumes that the signer's keys can't be compromised, and re-introduces the issues of key pinning that the WebPKI community has been pushing very hard to eliminate from its dependents. I don't think it's a workable solution.
That is a good point.
Google Chrome has a static, preloaded pin set for Google's own web properties, I guess these minor ccTLDs were not covered by that.
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
oops :)
I misread.
Thanks for the correction.
.GL is Greenland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.gl
I'm just waiting for Claude-powered hackers to break into the dns root system or bgp routing system. It's going to be a wreck :(
Time to set up our own nets with portable radios
A central authority can give each of us a chunk of a 128-bit address space and then we can route peer to peer based on shortest paths. Wait...
Did you know you're allowed to own an IP address block without making it publicly routable? They will have to periodically call you to make sure you're still using it, but it's otherwise allowed.
How much does a /24 go for these days anyway...
Thats hardened infra, not vibe coded webapps. There are a lot fewer vulnerabilities in that.
BGP hijacking occurs periodically but not with Claude
Can we please have just one post on the front page of HN without AI astroturfing comments at the top?
Increasingly it seems domain cert issuance is too important to be left to computers. Shame we have no backup solution.
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.
Pour one out for https://google.co.ck. (Although at least it still redirects.)
> These incidents did not involve a compromise of Google’s systems
But a compromise of Google's users.
I think we are potentially being told Google has domain names but no employees in those countries. This otherwise sounds quite implausible, and I don't know enough to say Google is lying.
> But a compromise of Google's users.
Did it? If you get a link to google.gh, did you at any point assume that's the real Google?
If I received a link to google.co.uk I would, because I'm in the UK. Why would I think otherwise if I were in Ghana and saw a link to google.gh?
Browsers happily killed EV certificates. With EV such a hack would take quite a bit more effort.
I have a machine in the UK. If I use it to go to google.co.uk, it redirects to google.com.
Hell:
This seems like bullshit given certificate pinning and other countermeasures here. What am I missing ?
Is it TLDs lacking support for this?
certificate pinning is generally not recommended and wouldn't work in browsers that use the browsers/operating system's root CA store anyways. CAAs can be edited by the one who controls the domain's DNS records.