[cabfpub] Potential F2F Topics

[Peter Bowen]

I haven’t seen much recent activity on topics for the F2F.  It looks like we still have most of the second day with placeholders to be filled in.

I would like to suggest two topics:

1) Non-FIPS algorithms for customer public keys and certificate signing

The Baseline Requirements current primarily use the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) published by the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology as a reference for hash and digital signature algorithms.  A number of groups are doing work on new algorithms that are not likely to be memorialized in a FIPS or will take a very long time to do so.  These include EdDSA (including Ed25519 and Ed448) from Dan Bernstein and the IRTF/IETF, SM2 & SM3 from the China Office of State Commercial Cryptography Administration, GOST R 34.10-2012 from the Euroasian Interstate Council for Standardization, Metrology and Certification, and ECGDSA from Germany, and ECKCDSA from Korea.  Additionally there are “Post-Quantum” algorithms coming down the pipeline that will arrive at some future point.

How do we want to handle these?  What requirements should be in place before we added these to the BRs and allow CAs start to utilize these?


2) Network and Certificate Systems Security Requirements

The Network and Certificate Systems Security Requirements (NCSSR) were discussed at the last F2F but it was kind of dropped.  What challenges are CAs finding?  Are there places where they are not clear or where they can be interpreted to ban practices the Forum feels are appropriate?  As they are a separate document from the BRs, do trust store maintainers expect that all CAs (whether for SSL or not) are audited as meeting the requirements or do they only apply to “SSL” CAs?

Ideally members would send data on their experiences ahead of time so we can have a productive discussion.

Thanks,
Peter