Yeah – I’ll be providing an accurate incident report (working on gathering all 
the information). The incident report assumes we don’t revoke of course. 
Revocation is still on the table. However, I wanted to start the conversation 
with everything I know so far:



1) ~2200 certs 

2) Roughly 15 companies
3) Only one has publicly chimed in so far on the Mozilla thread (still hoping 
more will…)

4) Revocation of all certs will occur by May 1, 2019, depending on how the 
discussion here goes.   
5) The common thread is that the Jan 15th deadline falls in the blackout window 
of most orgs. They generally come off it between Jan 15-Feb 15. They can’t 
replace the cert or change the domain so the 30 day cert option doesn’t help.

6) We provided notice as soon as the ballot passed. We blocked issuance prior 
to that date, but we’d hoped that the certs could remain valid until 
expiration. We had trouble with our BI providing the information so some 
notices went out later than I’d hoped. I’ll find the exact date on when all 
notices were complete.

 

Ballot 202 failed. I’m not sure how it’s relevant other than to indicate there 
was definite disagreement about whether underscores were permitted or not. As 
previously mentioned, I didn’t consider underscore characters prohibited until 
the ballot was proposed eliminating them in Oct. I know the general Mozilla 
population disagrees but, right or wrong, that’s the root cause of it all. I 
can explain my reasoning again here, but I doubt it materially alters the 
conversation and outcome. 

 

From: Ryan Sleevi <[email protected]> 
Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2018 7:35 PM
To: Jeremy Rowley <[email protected]>
Cc: mozilla-dev-security-policy <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Underscore characters

 

Jeremy,

 

It seems like any answer for what it "might" look like if a CA violated the BRs 
in a particular way is going to be predicated on what the incident report says. 
In the case of a hypothetical like this, it seems like the hypothetical 
incident report would discuss what is planned or proposed, and should a CA go 
forward with such an intentional violation, the 'actual' incident report would 
equally consider how accurate that was.

 

Recall that the approach to incident reporting is not punitive - it's to make 
sure that we're addressing systemic gaps and issues, that we've understood the 
issues, and have the available data to assess the impact, risk, and any 
patterns of issues. The incident reporting template is one way to provide that 
data in a structured way and to gather feedback.

 

I think a minimum next step is to move from the abstract discussion to the 
concrete: imagine you went forward on Jan 15 and had to file an incident 
report. Write the report like that. Include the timeframes, affected 
certificates, impact, root causes, remediation plans, etc. Having a complete 
presentation of what the discussion is about seems critical to having that 
discussion, because it would be unreasonable to expect information to trickle 
in and new customers or use cases added as the discussion progresses.

 

Thus there's a balance to be struck: Treating each hypothetical as a "separate" 
incident report runs the risk of being considered in isolation, ignoring both 
the systemic gaps and the cumulative risk. At the same time, treating it as a 
"singular" incident report tries to paint all problems in the same stroke, and 
can overlook distinct systemic issues. Both cases run the risk of "scope 
creep", which is constantly adding or expanding the scope, which is as well 
received in legitimate incident reports as it is hypothetical (which is to say: 
not well). Perhaps the best analogy is to that of subordinate CAs: each time a 
subordinate has an issue, that's an incident report, and a pattern of issues at 
distinct subordinates is equally a concerning issue for the parent CA. You 
don't want to loop all distinct subordinates into one issue, but you also don't 
want to lose sight of the systemic issues with the parent.

 

Beyond that framing and execution, it seems useful to suggest that any timeline 
about underscores should at least acknowledge Ballot 202 in June 2017 and 
any/all steps the CA took leading up to and following SC12. 

 

None of this is radically new or should be surprising: DigiCert and other CAs 
have already had similar conversations in discussing other matters of BR 
compliance and revocation. All of these have become part of the CA's record of 
incidents. When the CA proposes extending revocation timelines, a discussion of 
the facts, risks, scope, and patterns play a core part in any discussion in 
determining the short term acceptability of the proposal, and unquestionably 
all factor in to any long-term discussions that may later happen.

 

The one last closing thought is that I think we're in the waning days for when 
such hypothetical issues or concrete delay proposals can or should be 
discussed. Given the many discussions that have been had regarding revocation - 
regarding technical non-compliance, compromised keys, weak validation, etc - 
the argument that "replacing a cert is hard" is not really going to be 
acceptable anymore without demonstration about what steps are being taken by 
CAs and Subscribers to mitigate that risk (such as automation) and communicate 
expectations (such as in Subscriber Agreements or Terms of Sale). I don't think 
we want to go through 2019, and certainly not come out of it, having the same 
conversations we've been having in 2018. The best way to prevent that is for 
CAs to take clear steps to work to resolve these issues with their customers, 
so that it never becomes an issue for them, or their CA, in the first place. 
CAs that aren't able to demonstrate steps towards that in future discussions 
are unlikely to be looked upon too favorably if there are future incident 
reports.

 

On Tue, Dec 18, 2018 at 5:43 PM Jeremy Rowley via dev-security-policy 
<[email protected] 
<mailto:[email protected]> > wrote:

The total number of certs impacted is about 2200. Just more info.

-----Original Message-----
From: dev-security-policy <[email protected] 
<mailto:[email protected]> > On
Behalf Of Jeremy Rowley via dev-security-policy
Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2018 3:28 PM
To: mozilla-dev-security-policy
<[email protected] 
<mailto:[email protected]> >
Subject: Underscore characters

We're looking at the feasibility of replacing the certificates with
underscore characters by Jan 15th. Revoking all of the certificates will
cause pretty bad outages. We're prepared to revoke them but would like to
discuss (before the date) what should happen if we don't revoke. There are
about 15 customers (which I can't disclose the names yet but am working on
the list of certs). The number of certificates range between 1700-100
certificates per customer. 



The primary reason for this is every one of these organization are in a
holiday blackout.  The blackout periods end between Jan 12-Feb 15. Can we
start this discussion now on what this means? I'll provide certificate lists
as I have a timeline on when they plan on replacing.



Jeremy



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