[cabf_validation] [EXTERNAL]Re: Ballot Proposal: Validation Method in certificatePolicies

Ryan Sleevi sleevi at google.com
Tue Aug 14 12:30:39 MST 2018


On Tue, Aug 14, 2018 at 2:49 PM Tim Hollebeek <tim.hollebeek at digicert.com>
wrote:

> Ok, so the speculation about my motivations are completely ridiculous and
> I’m not going to address them.  Suffice it to say neither of your
> speculations is even remotely close to correct.
>

I'm sorry you feel I was speculating about your motives. Can you highlight
where I did, and where I was wrong? I'm providing and citing the arguments
and concerns you've raised, and solely discussing that. I think, to the
extent anything in the Forum can be productive, understanding your base set
of concerns is going to be key to finding a solution that works for you. If
you believe my understanding of your concerns is incorrect, I hope you can
highlight it.


> I will say, thinking about it more, I think BIT STRING is optimizing for
> the wrong case.  I think large numbers of validation methods in a
> particular certificate will be vanishingly rare, so I think in the long
> term, just a sequence of integers is probably both easier to use, and more
> compact, since the number of elements will be strongly peaked at one.
>

I'm not sure I understand this concern. The stated argument for BIT STRING
is because it ensures no ambiguity with the "one and exactly one instance
of a validation method" being present - that is, the issue Doug raised with
SET and SEQUENCE. Further, it addresses the concerns you raised previously
with RELATIVE OID (which appeared to be a deal breaker for you, given you
stated DigiCert would vote against other approaches), namely, the size
concern. This is clearly the most compact form of representing the
information, in which additional methods cost only a single bit of
information, rather than the three bytes that would be needed for an
INTEGER (tag, length, and value).

As I said, the inability to understand your set of concerns, and the
seemingly shifting and incompatible nature of them, is making it hard to
find a solution that you find acceptable, which is very much my goal - both
now and going forward.
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