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IPR Policy

Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Policy v. 1.3 – effective 3 July 2018

CAB Forum Agreement for IPR Policy v.1.3

The CA/Browser Forum’s IPR Policy governs Contributions by members of the Forum during the drafting and adoption process of Normative Requirements by a Working Group. A Contribution is any material “made verbally or in a tangible form of expression (including in electronic media) which is provided by a Participant in the process of developing a Draft Guideline for the purpose of incorporating such material into a Draft Guideline or a Final Guideline or Final Maintenance Guideline.” The term “Draft Guideline” includes ballots that are being considered for adoption by a Working Group as either a “Final Guideline” or a “Final Maintenance Guideline”.

When a ballot to amend an existing Final Guideline is adopted by a Working Group, that amendment is considered a Final Maintenance Guideline, and each of the above guideline documents, as amended, is then considered a “Final Guideline” of the CA/Browser Forum.

Each of the following documents is considered a “Final Guideline”:

EV TLS Certificate Guidelines

TLS Baseline Requirements

Network and Certificate System Security Requirements

Code Signing Baseline Requirements

S/MIME Baseline Requirements

Additional Information

Forum IPR Subcommittee

IPR Review Notices

IPR Exclusion Notices

CABF-IPR-Policy-v.1.2 (effective from 15 February 2016 to 2 July 2018)

Prior IPR_Policy_V1 (effective from 1-Aug-2012 to 14-Feb-2016)

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