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[Acme] ACME or EST?

Paul Hoffman <paul.hoffman@vpnc.org> Tue, 25 November 2014 21:41 UTC

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From: Paul Hoffman <paul.hoffman@vpnc.org>
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Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 13:41:19 -0800
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Subject: [Acme] ACME or EST?
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Greetings again. The abstract of the ACME pre-draft at https://github.com/letsencrypt/acme-spec (which Richard will hopefully publish as a real draft soon) says:

   This
   document describes a protocol that a certificate authority (CA) and a
   applicant can use to automate the process of verification and
   certificate issuance. The protocol also provides facilities for
   other certificate management functions, such as certificate
   revocation.

This overlaps a lot with "Enrollment over Secure Transport" (EST), <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7030>.

For many people who saw last week's announcement, the main use case of ACME is "make it easy to create a client that can create a key, get it enrolled with a server, get the new certificate back, and install that certificate in a web server". What does/will ACME offer that EST does not already?

--Paul Hoffman

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