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

[Wayne Thayer]

This begins the review 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/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: Not before 2018-11-02, 19:00 UTC

Vote for approval (7 days)
Start Time: 2018-11-xx, 19:00 UTC
End Time: 2018-11-xx, 19:00 UTC
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://cabforum.org/pipermail/servercert-wg/attachments/20181026/36889a3f/attachment.html>