That’s not well defined as there are various grades below that. Is the plan to 
remove any CA that doesn’t comply with this requirement? 

 

From: Ryan Sleevi <r...@sleevi.com> 
Sent: Friday, December 7, 2018 2:26 PM
To: Jeremy Rowley <jeremy.row...@digicert.com>
Cc: mozilla-dev-security-policy <mozilla-dev-security-pol...@lists.mozilla.org>
Subject: Re: CA Communication: Underscores in dNSNames

 

 

On Fri, Dec 7, 2018 at 2:00 PM Jeremy Rowley via dev-security-policy 
<dev-security-policy@lists.mozilla.org 
<mailto:dev-security-policy@lists.mozilla.org> > wrote:

This isn't a CA-issue because the risk associated with non-compliance isn't
defined yet.

 

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/security-group/certs/policy/

 

""Mozilla MAY, at its sole discretion, decide to disable (partially or fully) 
or remove a certificate at any time and for any reason. This may happen 
immediately or on a planned future date. Mozilla will disable or remove a 
certificate if the CA demonstrates ongoing or egregious practices that do not 
maintain the expected level of service or that do not comply with the 
requirements of this policy.""

 

Sounds like the risk is well-defined and documented.

 

>From what I've heard here, the risk is distrust or loss of EV
indicators, which is distrust-like. That's a pretty big thing to push back
on the CA for a non-security issue.  Thus, I think the risk of missing the
underscore revocation date needs to be discussed here so everyone, including
website operators and the relying parties, know first-hand what the risks of
the CA missing the deadline are. 

 

Any and every qualification or failure to abide by the program requirements 
comes with it the risk of sanction, up to, and including, distrust.

 

It sounds like you're looking for a way for CAs to make a cost/benefit analysis 
as to whether it's more beneficial to them to violate requirements, by having a 
clearer guarantee what it will cost them if they intentionally do so, versus 
what they may gain from their Subscribers. That doesn't really seem aligned 
with the incentives of the ecosystem or the relying parties, since CAs (and 
their Subscribers) are not able to, on purely technical level, evaluate the 
cost or impact to Relying Parties, since Relying Parties include every possible 
entity that trusts that root.

 

If the risk is that there is a note on the
audit, that is an acceptable risk. If the risk is a loss of the
root...probably less so.  Pushing the question back to the CA without better
discussion by the browsers makes finding a solution or understanding the
risks impossible.  

 

While I think it's positive and encouraging to see CAs acknowledge that their 
audits exist to disclose non-conformities/qualifications, I don't think it 
should be seen as legitimizing or accepting that intentional 
non-conformities/qualifications are desirable. A well-run CA should strive to 
have zero qualifications, findings, or non-conformities - not because they were 
able to convince their auditor that they weren't issues / were minor, but 
because they operated above and beyond reproach, and there were literally no 
issues. Anything short of that is an indicator that a CA is failing in its role 
as a trusted steward, and repeated failures seem reasonable to discuss sanction 
or distrust. CAs (and their sub-CAs) with a pattern of incidents on the 
incident dashboard ( https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Incident_Dashboard and 
https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Closed_Incidents ) probably have the greatest risk 
of sanction, given the pre-existing patterns of non-compliance.

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