During the last few month many issues concerning sub-ordinated CA 
certificates of CAs, considered for inclusion and CAs already included 
in NSS, have come up at this forum. Today exists a situation where the 
Mozilla CA policy doesn't provide enough guiding and definition, because 
the policy was defined originally with assumptions not holding the water 
for todays realities (freely quoting Frank here).

I have the feeling that everything related to sub-ordinated CA 
certificates has reached "dangerous" levels and makes it almost 
impossible to clearly know if the Mozilla CA policy is still protecting 
the user of the various Mozilla products. There are and were various 
situations and setups of different CAs from:

- governmental institutions issuing sub CA certificates to "authorized" 
CAs,
- sub CAs shipped via Internet download by the issuing CA,
- CAs which are chained to such an extend, that it's hard to believe 
that the CA which has its root in Mozilla, has any control over the 
issuing entity,
- sub CAs without any clear policies in place,
- Auditing of said CAs simply non-existent and more...

Additionally, in a short time, various CAs will be considered for 
"upgrading" to EV status, including at least one CA with more than _124_ 
sub ordinated CA certificates, of which all of them are supposed to 
receive this status. This is such a wide spread phenomena which has 
outgrown our current policy to such an extend, that _I'm requesting 
hereby and now to have thorough review of this situation and 
reassessment_ of the Mozilla CA policy concerning everything related to 
sub-ordinated CAs.

Please note that I'm not making any suggestions and arguments right now 
about what a sound policy should be, rather I believe that it requires 
an extensive assessment of the current situation and related discussion 
in order to define the best definitions. But there is going to be an 
unbelievable, explosive situation also in relation to EV upgrades which 
perhaps nobody of us has foreseen, a situation which goes completely 
against the spirit and objectives of EV itself - the major reason why 
Mozilla has supported this effort in first place!

In connection of this request, I'd also like to have cross-signing 
between CA roots defined in the Mozilla CA policy, since cross-signing 
might touch a similar field, which could at some point land us in a 
similar situation of loosing control.

-- 
Regards 
 
Signer:         Eddy Nigg, StartCom Ltd. <http://www.startcom.org>
Jabber:         [EMAIL PROTECTED] <xmpp:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Blog:   Join the Revolution! <http://blog.startcom.org>
Phone:          +1.213.341.0390
 

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