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Ballot SC035: Cleanups and Clarifications

The voting period for Ballot SC35 has ended and the Ballot has Passed. Here are the results:

Voting by Certificate Issuers – 21 votes total including abstentions

– 21 Yes votes: Actalis, Buypass, Camerfirma, Chunghwa Telecom, D-TRUST, DigiCert, Disig, eMudhra, Entrust Datacard, Firmaprofesional, GDCA, GlobalSign, HARICA, iTrusChina, Let’s Encrypt, OISTE, SSL.com, SwissSign, TrustCor, SecureTrust (former Trustwave), Visa – 0 No votes: – 0 Abstain:

100% of voting Certificate Issuers voted in favor.

Voting by Certificate Consumers – 7 votes total including abstentions

– 7 Yes votes: Apple, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, 360 – 0 No votes: – 0 Abstain:

100% of voting Certificate Consumers voted in favor.

Relevant Bylaw references

Bylaw 2.3(f) requires:

– a “yes” vote by two-thirds of Certificate Issuer votes and 50%-plus-one Certificate Consumer votes for approval. Votes to abstain are not counted for this purpose. This requirement was met for both Certificate Issuers and Certificate Consumers. – at least one Certificate Issuer and one Certificate Consumer Member must vote in favor of a ballot for the ballot to be adopted. This requirement was also met.

Under Bylaw 2.3(g), “a ballot result will be considered valid only when more than half of the number of currently active Members has participated”. Votes to abstain are counted in determining a quorum. Half of currently active Members as of the start of voting was 10, so quorum was 11 votes – quorum was met.”

Purpose of Ballot

This ballot attempts to fix the numerous typographical and editorial issues that have been identified in the SCWG documents (“spring cleanup”), such as incorrect section references, expired effective dates, or spelling and grammatical mistakes. Additionally, it attempts to provide guidance and clarification for language that has been viewed as ambiguous, multiple, or conflicting interpretations.

CAs SHOULD carefully review each change, to ensure no normative impact upon their CA operations and practices that may have resulted from these ambiguities and consistency issues.

The following motion has been proposed by Ryan Sleevi of Google and endorsed by Ben Wilson of Mozilla and Doug Beattie of GlobalSign. This ballot is available at GitHub at https://github.com/cabforum/documents/pull/208 with further discussion of the changes

Motion begins

This ballot modifies the “Baseline Requirements for the Issuance and Management of Publicly-Trusted Certificates” (“Baseline Requirements”), based on Version 1.7.1:

MODIFY the Baseline Requirements as defined in the following redline:

https://github.com/cabforum/documents/compare/6b870f92d4788a52c2bbc9d96a1db17751e906b1..884eef6eb4bd96aa41d3380c1450ee0801be2f33

This ballot modifies the “Guidelines for the Issuance and Management of Extended Validation Certificates” (“EV Guidelines”) as follows, based on Version 1.7.3:

MODIFY the EV Guidelines as defined in the following redline:

https://github.com/cabforum/documents/compare/6b870f92d4788a52c2bbc9d96a1db17751e906b1..884eef6eb4bd96aa41d3380c1450ee0801be2f33

Motion ends

This ballot proposes two Final Maintenance Guidelines.

The procedure for approval of this ballot is as follows:

Discussion (7+ days) Start Time: 2020-08-25 17:00 UTC End Time: 2020-09-02 19:30 UTC

Vote for approval (7 days) Start Time: 2020-09-02 20:00 UTC End Time: 2020-09-09 20:00 UTC

Latest releases
Server Certificate Requirements
SC-081v3: Introduce Schedule of Reducing Validity and Data Reuse Periods - May 21, 2025

BR v2.1.5

Code Signing Requirements
v3.8 - Aug 5, 2024

What’s Changed CSC-25: Import EV Guidelines to CS Baseline Requirements by @dzacharo in https://github.com/cabforum/code-signing/pull/38 Full Changelog: https://github.com/cabforum/code-signing/compare/v3.7...v3.8

S/MIME Requirements
v1.0.9 - Ballot SMC011 - May 14, 2025

This ballot allows the option to use a European Unique Identifier (EUID) as a Registration Reference in the NTR Registration Scheme. The EUID uniquely identifies officially-registered organizations, Legal Entities, and branch offices within the European Union or the European Economic Area. The EUID is specified in chapter 9 of the Annex contained in the Implementing Regulation (EU) 2021/1042 which describes rules for the application of Directive (EU) 2017/1132 “relating to certain aspects of company law (codification)”. The ballot also includes several editorial corrections, (e.g., reordering of References and regrouping of information from Appendix A to Section 7.1.4.2.2 (d)). This ballot is proposed by Stephen Davidson (DigiCert) and endorsed by Adrian Mueller (SwissSign) and Adriano Santoni (Actalis).

Network and Certificate System Security Requirements
v2.0 - Ballot NS-003 - Jun 26, 2024

Ballot NS-003: Restructure the NCSSRs in https://github.com/cabforum/netsec/pull/35

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