Dear Ben,

Thanks a lot for your effort which is highly appreciated.

SwissSign would prefer option 2 (Consequences of Delayed Revocation) over 
option 1 as an interim policy change. The reason being that it has nudges the 
customer toward automation. However we believe that there are some customers 
who really struggle with automation and we believe it is important to get more 
insights into what exactly their problems are.

Additionally, from a customer point of view (as well as the whole PKI 
community) it would be important to outline the final target state that such an 
interim policy change would work towards including the time frame of the final 
state.

>From our previous delayed revocation, we know that:

  *   public trust certificates are used where private PKIs may be better suited
  *   customer internal approval processes take more time than a 24h/5d 
revocation timeline allows
  *   certificate pinning is still used (although it is generally known that 
it's a bad idea) that requires update to applications
  *   update of certificates in Apps that require re-publishing in App-Stores 
which may not be possible within the required timeline
  *   customer awareness of their contractually agreed requirement to be able 
to deal with 24h/5d revocation is low

All these are not problems that a CA alone can fix. All we can do is educate, 
support to the best of our abilities and revoke on time.

Finally, we think that we should consider if TLS and S/MIME should be treated 
the same or not. To this, we currently don't have a position/preference.

Kind regards

Sandy Balzer / SwissSign team

Von: 'Ben Wilson' via [email protected] 
<[email protected]>
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 19. September 2024 23:53
An: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Betreff: Proposal for an Interim Policy to Address Delayed Revocation


Hi folks,

We have discussed delayed revocation a bit internally and wanted to come back 
to the community with some thoughts.

We agree that expanding beyond the existing revocation timelines (24 hours / 5 
days) is undesirable. While we think some exceptional delayed revocations are 
necessary as a current practicality, we do want to eventually sunset this 
policy. To that end, we'd like to refine our existing policy so that it is more 
effective and equitable during the interim.

We're skeptical about proposals to pre-identify domains that will require 
delayed revocation. We expect that many sites might ask for such exceptions, 
and an extensive amount of deliberation would be required in order to process 
these requests. Worse, in practice, doubtless some sites impacted in a 
revocation event would not have followed the procedure, and CAs would still be 
left with a last-minute decision about whether a revocation will inflict 
substantial harm.

Instead, we would like to seek the community's feedback on the following two 
proposals:

  1.  Clarification of existing requirements
We would be more explicit about what would be required for delayed revocation. 
Some ideas include:

     *   Explicitly clarifying that CAs must revoke certificates by default, 
that any delayed revocation must be the result of an explicit request by the 
subscriber, containing the necessary information, and meeting the requirements 
under such interim policy;

     *   That subscriber requests contain a clear claim or explanation about 
the critical nature of the system and why timely revocation is not possible 
(more detailed requirements to be discussed);

     *   That the requests are signed by a company officer, or similar legal 
representative, stating that the information in the request is accurate to the 
best of their knowledge;

     *   That the information contained in the subscriber's request be accurate 
to the CA's understanding (e.g. not materially contradicted by other facts 
known to the CA);

     *   That each granted request be published for the community (and Mozilla) 
to scrutinize (allowing CAs to redact PII prior to publication); and

     *   That CAs be required to produce summary statistics in their reports 
(alongside the individual granted requests) detailing how many requests were 
received, how many were well-formed, how many were granted, etc.

  1.  Consequences of Delayed Revocation
We believe that if a domain hosts critical infrastructure that cannot tolerate 
timely revocation, then it is deeply damaging to the web PKI. In order to help 
these domains transition to effective certificate management practices and 
automated tooling, we propose that domains that are granted delayed revocation 
must then be limited to shorter-lifetime certificates as a consequence of such 
decision. This also ensures that future revocations impacting such domains have 
much less impact.

Concretely, the domains accepted for delayed revocation by a CA are already 
public. If this proposal were to be adopted, root programs would manage a 
shared list of such domains (e.g. via the CCADB) and require CAs to limit the 
lifetimes of certificates issued to these domains (e.g. to 90 days).

We stress that both of these proposals are presented for early feedback, and we 
look forward to the community's thoughts on whether they are likely to be 
suitable and effective, and how they might be improved. We would also look to 
align these policies across the root programs in order to provide clarity for 
the entire community.

Thanks and best wishes,

Ben
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