Skip to content

ACME Protocol Validation

ACME Protocol Validation is the process used by a Certificate Authority (CA) to verify that an applicant controls a domain name before issuing a TLS certificate^[400-devops-02-os-and-linux-basics-network-free-domain.md]. This validation typically involves the CA checking for a specific resource at a standardized path on the applicant's web server^[400-devops-02-os-and-linux-basics-network-free-domain.md].

Validation Path

The standard mechanism for this validation requires the server to expose a specific directory and a token file. For the domain EXAMPLE.COM, the validation path is located at:

/.well-known/acme-challenge/^[400-devops-02-os-and-linux-basics-network-free-domain.md]

This directory must be accessible via HTTP to allow the validation server to retrieve the challenge token.

Alternative Formats

While the "acme-challenge" path is associated with the standard ACME protocol, similar validation logic is used by other certificate authorities that may use different directory names. For instance, the path /.well-known/pki-validation/ is sometimes used to host specific text files required by certain CAs^[400-devops-02-os-and-linux-basics-network-free-domain.md].

  • [[TLS]]
  • [[DNS]]
  • [[SSL Certificates]]

Sources

^[400-devops-02-os-and-linux-basics-network-free-domain.md]