[Servercert-wg] Ballot SC22: Reduce Certificate Lifetimes

Dean Coclin dean.coclin at digicert.com
Tue Aug 20 05:04:32 MST 2019


I believe this is referring to a comment I made at a recent CA/B Forum meeting where I stated we were going to send out a survey to our “enterprise” customers. I believed this to be true at the time I said it, but I later found out that the survey went to all customers (i.e. enterprise, retail, partner, etc.) and not any specific target. 

 

Dean

 

From: Servercert-wg <servercert-wg-bounces at cabforum.org> On Behalf Of Ryan Sleevi via Servercert-wg
Sent: Monday, August 19, 2019 7:28 PM
To: Tobias S. Josefowitz <tobij at opera.com>
Cc: CA/B Forum Server Certificate WG Public Discussion List <servercert-wg at cabforum.org>
Subject: Re: [Servercert-wg] Ballot SC22: Reduce Certificate Lifetimes

 

 

 

On Mon, Aug 19, 2019 at 6:56 PM Tobias S. Josefowitz <tobij at opera.com <mailto:tobij at opera.com> > wrote:

In line with that, I doubt the referenced post would prime the 
participants of said survey to much but their own, en masse not terribly 
informed opinion.

It would go against my expectations if any such survey showed a nuanced 
understanding of regulatory challenges present in the ecosystem.

 

Hi Tobi,

 

Just to take a few snippets here of your mail. I certainly didn't have very high expectations for the survey, based on the information previously shared, so I doubt my perspective on the results from the specific questions is that valuable here. That's why I was hoping to understand more about DigiCert's goals and objectives in sharing the results, which I think is far more important.

 

Part of the concern is that while DigiCert's post in this thread didn't acknowledge the selection method, DigiCert's past communications from not-yet-public calls made it clear that they were not after an objective selection, and were carefully curating the list of customers solicited for feedback. That is, while presented as "a customer survey" and "an overwhelming number of customers", it was in fact a limited sample of certain "high-value" customers, and thus at best "an overwhelming number of hand-selected customers who responded to the survey".

 

I wasn't sure if that remained the selection methodology, or if something more rigorous had been applied. However, given that DigiCert did not provide context as to what they saw the particular value of the survey to be, or its relevance to the discussion, it was also unclear how to interpret the results they did decide to share. Assuming a perfectly fair and balanced survey, it seemed useful to highlight how, even in a responsibly selected study, techniques such as priming can spoil the results, and might thus impair achieving those goals.

 

While I certainly understand that academic rigor is not the objective here, it's important to consider these facts when evaluating the results DigiCert shared. I also wanted to help DigiCert here; as they're laboriously working to summarize respondents' free-form text results, if the survey was spoiled, or if the desired objective was fundamentally unobtainable due to the selection method, perhaps it's not worth that effort and not worth further discussion? That surely would save time and energy, which could then be used for more productive engagement?

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