[Servercert-wg] Ballot SC-75 - Pre-sign linting

Mon May 27 08:28:16 UTC 2024

Dear Dimitris (and all),

I don’t think that „SHOULD effective date of 15 September, 2024” is necessary. It’s been long-standing best practice to do some form of linting. So making it mandatory in March 2025 shouldn’t be a problem. 😊

However, I’m wondering how “…checked for conformance with the profiles and requirements defined in these Requirements” will be interpreted by auditors. Do the linters have to check all the requirements of the BRs (which IMHO is not possible), or just the “… technical conformity…” (which could mean that the cert is conforming to RFCs)?

Regards
Roman

From: Servercert-wg <servercert-wg-bounces at cabforum.org> On Behalf Of Dimitris Zacharopoulos (HARICA) via Servercert-wg
Sent: Sonntag, 26. Mai 2024 09:41
To: Ryan Dickson <ryandickson at google.com>; CA/B Forum Server Certificate WG Public Discussion List <servercert-wg at cabforum.org>
Subject: Re: [Servercert-wg] Ballot SC-75 - Pre-sign linting

Hi Ryan,

Thank you for the feedback. After some internal discussions with Corey and Ben, please see comments inline.
On 20/5/2024 10:35 μ.μ., Ryan Dickson wrote:

Hi Dimitris, Corey, and Ben,

Thank you for bringing this ballot forward for the group’s consideration.

A few questions:

  *   Given the perceived value of linting, should we consider a stronger position on its adoption (i.e., MUST versus SHOULD)? While I recognize that the Baseline Requirements represent minimum expectations, consistent and reliable adoption of linting seems to provide the ecosystem with the best chance of addressing the problem statement described in the ballot summary.

     *   To accomplish this goal, the ballot could be modified to require use of linting (either tbs certificate linting, pre-certificate linting, or final certificate linting), with tbs certificate linting being considered RECOMMENDED and final certificate linting as being considered NOT RECOMMENDED.
     *   This goal could be further realized by either a (1) phased-implementation (i.e., SHOULD now, MUST later) - or (2) a forward-looking effective date that considers a reasonable timeline for adoption for those CA Owners looking to adhere to the BRs that do not perform linting today.

I see two issues here:

  1.  Require linting with either a phased-approach or directly with a single effective date: I'm fine with either approach with a slight preference to the phased-in. CAs should have been following public incidents and m.d.s.p. discussions for years, so existing CAs should already be doing pre-sign linting. OTOH new CAs need the additional guidance. A CA will either have to create its own technical tools to check their profiles accuracy or use the recommended open-source tools we reference.
  2.  I'm fine with the stated preference for pre-signing over post-signing linting but the post-signing linting should not be "NOT RECOMMENDED" because it doesn't do any harm on its own. The fact is that we must clearly state that the pre-sign linting is mandatory and the post-sign linting is optional.
With that said, Ben and Corey have agreed with a SHOULD effective date of 15 September, 2024 and a SHALL effective date of 15 March, 2025. If people have objections to setting these effective dates, please let me know.

  *   Is it worth more clearly establishing expectations for the evaluation and, when applicable, deployment of updates made by or to linting tools. For example, can we establish a reasonable expectation that within 30(?) days after an update has been made to a linting tool relied upon by a CA, it has either (1) been adopted in the production issuance environment - or (2) considered not applicable given the scope of recent updates (for example, if a CA only issues DV certificates, and the most recent update only pertains to EV certificates, there is no expectation that the updated version is deployed).

This may open a series of questions around updates in other, more security-critical components of the CA pipeline. I think we should address this issue more holistically as it affects updates to hardware firmware, OS patches, CA vendor software updates, third-party software dependencies, switches/router firmware, and other dependencies in Certificate Management Systems.

It is also challenging to define what an "update" is, at which level (major, minor version), etc. I would prefer leaving that out of this particular ballot and let someone else address it in a separate ballot without risking the speed and success of the linting ballot. I hope this makes sense.

More feedback is welcome before proceeding with the changes.

Best regards,
Dimitris.

Thanks for your consideration.

- Ryan

On Mon, May 20, 2024 at 2:04 PM Inigo Barreira via Servercert-wg <servercert-wg at cabforum.org<mailto:servercert-wg at cabforum.org>> wrote:
Hi Dimitris,

I don´t know if the “(help to improve)” is adding any additional hidden requirement. IMO, I´d remove that.

Regards

De: Servercert-wg <servercert-wg-bounces at cabforum.org<mailto:servercert-wg-bounces at cabforum.org>> En nombre de Dimitris Zacharopoulos (HARICA) via Servercert-wg
Enviado el: lunes, 20 de mayo de 2024 19:57
Para: CA/B Forum Server Certificate WG Public Discussion List <servercert-wg at cabforum.org<mailto:servercert-wg at cabforum.org>>
Asunto: [Servercert-wg] Ballot SC-75 - Pre-sign linting

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SC-75 Pre-sign linting
Summary

There have been numerous compliance incidents publicly disclosed by CAs in which they failed to comply with the technical requirements described in standards associated with the issuance and management of publicly-trusted TLS Certificates. However, the industry has developed open-source tools, linters, that are free to use and can help CAs avoid certificate misissuance. Using such linters before issuing a precertificate from a Publicly-Trusted CA (pre-issuance linting) can prevent the mis-issuance in a wide variety of cases.

The following motion has been proposed by Dimitris Zacharopoulos of HARICA and endorsed by Corey Bonnell of Digicert and Ben Wilson of Mozilla.

You can view the GitHub pull request representing this ballot here<https://github.com/cabforum/servercert/pull/518>.

Motion Begins

MODIFY the "Baseline Requirements for the Issuance and Management of Publicly-Trusted TLS Server Certificates" based on Version 2.0.4 as specified in the following redline:

  *   https://github.com/cabforum/servercert/compare/049237e096650fe01f67780b7c24bd5211ee3038...ada5d6e0db76b32be28d64edd7b0677bbef9c2f5

Motion Ends

This ballot proposes a Final Maintenance Guideline. The procedure for approval of this ballot is as follows:

Discussion (at least 7 days)

  *   Start time: 2024-05-20 18:00:00 UTC
  *   End time: on or after 2024-05-27 18:00:00 UTC

Vote for approval (7 days)

  *   Start time: TBD
  *   End time: TBD

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