DCV
acronymcryptographysecurity
Stands for: Domain Control Validation
Proving you control a domain before a certificate is issued.
Domain Control Validation is how a CA confirms the requester controls the domain, via an HTTP, DNS, or email challenge. Baseline Requirements keep shrinking how long a DCV result can be reused, tightening certificate issuance.
Domain control validation is how a certificate authority establishes that the requester controls the name before issuing. The methods are publishing a token in DNS, serving a file over HTTP, or responding to a challenge during a TLS handshake.
The security of the entire public certificate system rests on this step, which is why the attacks worth worrying about target it rather than the cryptography: a BGP hijack that redirects the validation request, a DNS compromise, or a dangling subdomain pointing at infrastructure someone else can claim. Multi-perspective validation, where the authority checks from several network vantage points, is the mitigation for the routing-based version and is now standard practice.
Also known as: dcv