Depending on your DNS provider, it may be possible to narrow the permissions to allow only updates of a particular record. Route53 as an example:
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": "route53:ChangeResourceRecordSets",
"Resource": "arn:aws:route53:::hostedzone/<ZONE-ID>",
"Condition": {
"ForAllValues:StringEquals": {
"route53:ChangeResourceRecordSetsNormalizedRecordNames": "_acme-challenge.<SUB>.<DOMAIN>.<TLD>"
}
}
}
BIND 9 example:
* https://dan.langille.org/2020/12/19/creating-a-very-specific...
You can also point the hostname that you wish to issues certs for to another (sub-)domain completely via a CNAME, and allow updates only for that other (sub-)domain:
* https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh/wiki/DNS-alias-mo...
* https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/technical-deep-dive-se...
I've never heard of that CNAME approach for changing the validation domain. That looks like a viable solution since it requires a one-time setup on the main domain and ongoing access to the second (validation) domain.
At my last job we deployed a special sub-domain for that purpose (dnsauth.example.com) and manually created CNAMEs on our main (sub-)domains to point to it.
We then deployed a single (no-HA) externally exposed BIND server with a bunch of scripts that folks could connect to (we had deploy hooks scripts for users/developrs). Nowadays there even purpose-build DNS servers for this purpose:
My solution was to give up on CertBot and use dehydrated instead. This did require me to come up with a script to make the necessary API call to the DNS hosting, which dehydrated will then run as necessary.
A CertBot ticket on the subject opened January 2026:
The article says it is for those who
> prefer to keep DNS updates and sensitive credentials out of their issuance path.
I see that AWS permissions can be set to limit the risk of compromised credentials. That's a good idea. I see that the lego project has an example of this in their documentation: https://go-acme.github.io/lego/dns/route53/index.html#least-...
I'd look for a custom DNS challenge provider plugin which delegates the task of creating DNS records to another machine which holds the actual token.
> Get certificates for remote servers - The tokens used to provide validation of domain ownership, and the certificates themselves can be automatically copied to remote servers (via ssh, sftp or ftp for tokens). The script doesn't need to run on the server itself. This can be useful if you don't have access to run such scripts on the server itself, e.g. if it's a shared server.
* https://github.com/srvrco/getssl
It's written in Bash, so dependencies aren't too heavy.
If something gets the credentials for desec.io, they can only use them to do stuff with the single txt record.
No need to give broader access