[Servercert-wg] Ballot SC12 - Sunset of Underscores in dNSNames

[Wayne Thayer]

This begins the voting period for Ballot SC12 - Sunset of Underscores in
dNSNames

Purpose of Ballot

Ballot 202 included a provision creating a permanent exception permitting
the underscore character to be used in SAN fields of type dNSName. Since
that ballot failed in 2017, the practice has continued despite being
non-compliant with RFC 5280. This ballot creates a brief sunset period
intended to allow Subscribers who are relying on FQDNs containing
underscores to transition away from them, either by changing the name or
deploying a wildcard certificate.

The following motion has been proposed by Wayne Thayer of Mozilla and
endorsed by Dave Blunt of Amazon and Tim Shirley of Trustwave.

--- MOTION BEGINS ---
Add the following language to BR section 7.1.4.2.1 (Subject Alternative
Name Extension):

Prior to April 1, 2019, certificates containing underscore characters (“_”)
in domain labels in dNSName entries MAY be issued as follows:
* dNSName entries MAY include underscore characters such that replacing all
underscore characters with hyphen characters (“-“) would result in a valid
domain label, and;
* Underscore characters MUST NOT be placed in the left most domain label,
and;
* Such certificates MUST NOT be valid for longer than 30 days.

All certificates containing an underscore character in any dNSName entry
and having a validity period of more than 30 days MUST be revoked prior to
January 15, 2019.

After April 30, 2019, underscore characters (“_”) MUST NOT be present in
dNSName entries.

--- MOTION ENDS ---

This ballot proposes a Final Maintenance Guideline. A comparison of the
changes can be found at:
https://github.com/wthayer/documents/compare/master...wthayer:Underscores
<https://github.com/wthayer/documents/commit/9926d75d0b9a1969034a25864741eae4421a51e5>

The procedure for approval of this ballot is as follows:

Discussion (7-21 days)
Start Time: 2018-10-26, 19:00 UTC
End Time: 2018-11-02, 22:00 UTC

Vote for approval (7 days)
Start Time: 2018-11-02, 22:00 UTC
End Time: 2018-11-09, 22:00 UTC
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