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Ballot CSC-19: Remove TLS BR References

Results of Review Period

(Mailing list post is available here.)

The IPR review period ended on September 5, 2023 and no exclusion notices were filed.

The final documents, with the effective date being 2023-09-05, are available here.

This Review Notice is sent pursuant to Section 4.1 of the CA/Browser Forum’s Intellectual Property Rights Policy (v1.3). This Review Period is for a Final Maintenance Guideline (30 day Review Period). A complete Draft Guideline subject of this Review Notice is available here.

Ballot for Review: Ballot CSC-19

Start of Review Period: August 1, 2023 at 11:00am Eastern Time

End of Review Period: September 1, 2023 at 11:00am Eastern Time

Please forward a written notice to exclude Essential Claims to the Forum and Working Group Chair by email to dean.coclin@digicert.com and a copy to the CA/B Forum CSCWG public mailing list cscwg-public@cabforum.org before the end of the Review Period. See current version of CA/Browser Forum Intellectual Property Rights Policy for details.

Results of Voting

YesNoAbstain
Certificate IssuersDigiCert, Entrust, GDCA, GlobalSign, HARICA
Certificate ConsumersMicrosoft

This ballot has PASSED.

Purpose of the Ballot

This ballot updates the “Baseline Requirements for the Issuance and Management of Publicly‐Trusted Code Signing Certificates“ version 3.3 in order to remove references pointing the Baseline Requirements for Publicly-Trusted TLS Certificates (“TLS BRs”). The main goals of this ballot are to:

  1. Remove dependencies with the “TLS BRs” that are decided in a different CA/B Forum Working Group
  2. Remove ambiguity about which exact requirements are applicable to Code Signing Issuers and Time-stamping Authorities

The following motion has been proposed by Dimitris Zacharopoulos of HARICA and endorsed by Martijn Katerbarg of Sectigo and Tim Hollebeek of Digicert.

Motion

This ballot updates the “Baseline Requirements for the Issuance and Management of Publicly‐Trusted Code Signing Certificates” (“Code Signing Baseline Requirements”) based on version 3.3. MODIFY the Code Signing Baseline Requirements as specified in the following redline: here

Latest releases
Server Certificate Requirements
SC-089: Mass Revocation Planning - Aug 26, 2025

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
v1.0.12 - Ballot SMC014 - Oct 13, 2025

This ballot introduces requirements that a Certificate Issuer MUST deploy DNSSEC validation back to the IANA DNSSEC root trust anchor on all DNS queries associated with CAA record lookups performed by the Primary Network Perspective, effective March 15, 2026. The ballot is intended to maintain consistency in the S/MIME Baseline Requirements with the requirements of Ballot SC-085 which implemented identical requirements in the TLS Baseline Requirements. Note: SC-085 also introduced requirements in TLS Baseline Requirements for the use of DNSSEC in domain control validation. These requirements are automatically adopted in the S/MIME BR by the email domain control methods that include a normative reference to section 3.2.2.4 of the TLS Baseline Requirements. The draft also includes minor corrections to web links in the text. This ballot is proposed by Stephen Davidson (DigiCert) and endorsed by Client Wilson (Apple) and Ashish Dhiman (GlobalSign).

Network and Certificate System Security Requirements
Version 2.0.5 (Ballot NS-008) - Jul 9, 2025

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