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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
SC095v3: Clean-up 2025 - Apr 2, 2026

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
v1.0.14 - Ballot SMC016 - May 5, 2026

This ballot maintains consistency between the S/MIME Baseline Requirements and the TLS Baseline Requirements with changes introduced by Ballots SC096 and SC097. Specifically, this ballot: Creates a carve-out of the logging requirements for DNSSEC specifically, stating these are not in scope. For audit purposes, change management logging is able to confirm if the appropriate controls are in effect or not. Sunsets all remaining use of SHA-1 signatures in Certificates and CRLs. It is noted that most uses of SHA-1 signatures are already deprecated by SC097. With this ballot, all unexpired Subordinate CA Certificates issuing S/MIME containing the SHA-1 signature algorithm must be revoked. This proposal does not prohibit the use of SHA-1 to generate issuerKeyHash or issuerNameHash values as currently required by RFC 5019. Includes minor formatting corrections.

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

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