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Ballot CSC-24 - Timestamping Private Key Protection

Results of Voting

YesNoAbstain
Certificate IssuersDigiCert, Entrust, Globalsign, HARICA, IdenTrust, Sectigo
Certificate Consumers

There were not enough Certificate Consumer votes to pass the ballot. Therefore, the ballot FAILS.

Purpose of the Ballot

This ballot updates the “Baseline Requirements for the Issuance and Management of Publicly‐Trusted Code Signing Certificates“ version 3.7 in order to clarify language regarding Timestamp Authority Private Key Protection. The main goals of this ballot are to:

  1. Require Private Keys associated with newly issued Timestamp Authority Subordinate CA to be stored in offline HSMs
  2. Require newly issued Timestamp Certificates to be issued from a TSA CA with its Private key storedn in offline HSMs
  3. Add a requirement to remove Private Keys associated with Timestamp Certificates after a 18 months
  4. Add a requirement to reject SHA-1 timestamp requests

The following motion has been proposed by Martijn Katerbarg of Sectigo and endorsed by Bruce Morton of Entrust and Ian McMillan of Microsoft.

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 3.7. MODIFY the Code Signing Baseline Requirements as specified in the following redline: https://github.com/cabforum/code-signing/compare/d431d9104094f2b89f35ed4bf1d64b9a844e762b...61d9426e9025d448a13eb56fa75b9651b2136548

Latest releases
Server Certificate Requirements
SC100: DNSSEC Clarification and Consolidation - Sep 7, 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
v1.0.16 - Ballot SMC018 - Sep 29, 2026

This ballot implements the requirements of CCADB Policy Section 6.3 relating to cross-certificates into the S/MIME BR effective immediately. The ballot also specifies that effective July 1, 2027 id-kp-emailProtection (mandatory) and the id-kp-clientAuth (optional) are the only extKeyUsage (EKU) permitted in both Subordinate CA Certificates and Subscriber Certificates. Finally, the ballot clarifies in the Definitions that Legacy Generation profiles were deprecated effective July 15, 2025. This ballot is proposed by Stephen Davidson (DigiCert) and endorsed by Dustin Hollinback (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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The Certification Authority Browser Forum (CA/Browser Forum) is a voluntary gathering of Certificate Issuers and suppliers of Internet browser software and other applications that use certificates (Certificate Consumers).