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I think the issue is less with SaaS vendors doing cert pinning and more that many SaaS vendors offering deploying on customer domains often rely on those same customers to make the DNS changes for validation, and whenever you introduce another party like that it's exponentially more difficult to actually get things done in a timely matter.

IMO they should just use HTTP challenges to avoid this whole thing, but it's a pretty common pattern I see with a lot of SaaS vendors, even major fintechs.




That's one option. Alternatively, they could just delegate the _acme-challenge with a CNAME.

If clientportal.somebank.com is actually run by somesaas.com, they can define CNAME _acme-challenge.clientportal.somebank.com --> [some_key].domainvalidations.somesaas.com

When the SaaS vendor needs to request a new cert, they set the appropriate TXT record on [some_key].domainvalidations.somesaas.com.




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