[cabfpub] Results on Ballot 187 - Make CAA Checking Mandatory

[Ryan Sleevi]

On Thu, Mar 9, 2017 at 5:31 AM, Gervase Markham via Public <
public at cabforum.org> wrote:

> Hi Kirk and all,
>
> On 08/03/17 22:00, Kirk Hall via Public wrote:
> > The voting period for Ballot 187 has ended.  Here are the results.
>
> Thank you for tabulating these results; I'm very happy to see such a
> degree of final consensus on what is, I know, a controversial issue. I
> remain committed to making sure that some of the fears of some members
> about abuse of this technology do not come to pass.
>
> There is one small "bug" in the wording which was pointed out privately
> during the voting period, which I intend to fix in a quick ballot. At
> the moment the text says:
>
> "CAs MUST respect the critical flag and reject any unrecognized
> properties with this flag set."
>
> But this is not what should happen according to the CAA RFC. If there is
> an unrecognised property with the critical flag set, the CA should not
> just reject the property, they should fail closed. Here is an example of
> the problems one can get from trying to reproduce the intent and
> commands of an RFC in our documents, rather than just incorporating by
> reference :-)
>
> I propose replacing the above sentence with the more accurate:
>
> "CAs MUST respect the critical flag and not issue a certificate if they
> encounter an unrecognized property with this flag set."
>
> I will be preparing a ballot to this effect in the next few days.
> Without reopening any of the other controversial issues related to CAA,
> if anyone else has wording clarifications for this section, send me an
> email.
>
> Gerv
>

This bug was independently discovered by another person watching the ballot
and pointed out to me this morning, so I wholly support that clarification,
as I'm wholly responsible for that bug :)

The 'intent' was very much to say "reject the certificate", as stated in
6844, but my wording of "reject any unrecognized properties" left an
ambiguity that it may be acceptable to ignore such properties and issue the
certificate - the very opposite of what was intended and what we'd
discussed, on the list, as the goal :)

I'd be happy to endorse such a correction, and think we should err on the
side of caution by treating it as substantive (a ballot), rather than
typographical, so I appreciate your suggestion and offer to formulate such
a ballot.
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