Mozilla has sent a CA Communication to inform Certification Authorities (CAs) who have root certificates included in Mozilla’s program about current events relevant to their membership in our program and to remind them of upcoming deadlines. This CA Communication has been emailed to the Primary Point of Contact (POC) and an email alias for each CA in Mozilla’s program, and they have been asked to respond to the following 7 action items:

Mozilla recently published version 2.6.1 of our Root Store Policy. The first action confirms that CAs have read the new version of the policy. The second action asks CAs to ensure that their CP/CPS complies with the changes that were made to domain validation requirements in version 2.6.1 of Mozilla’s Root Store Policy. CAs must confirm that they will comply with the new requirement for intermediate certificates issued after 1-January 2019 to be constrained to prevent use of the same intermediate certificate to issue both SSL and S/MIME certificates. CAs are reminded in action 4 that Mozilla is now rejecting audit reports that do not comply with section 3.1.4 of Mozilla’s Root Store Policy. CAs must confirm that they have complied with the 1-August 2018 deadline to discontinue use of BR domain validation methods 1 “Validating the Applicant as a Domain Contact” and 5 “Domain Authorization Document” CAs are reminded of their obligation to add new intermediate CA certificates to CCADB within one week of certificate creation, and before any such subordinate CA is allowed to issue certificates. Later this year, Mozilla plans to begin preloading the certificate database shipped with Firefox with intermediate certificates disclosed in the CCADB, as an alternative to “AIA chasing”. This is intended to reduce the incidence of “unknown issuer” errors caused by server operators neglecting to include intermediate certificates in their configurations. In action 7 we are gathering information about the Certificate Transparency (CT) logging practices of CAs. Later this year, Mozilla is planning to use CT logging data to begin testing a new certificate validation mechanism called CRLite which may reduce bandwidth requirements for CAs and increase performance of websites. Note that CRLite does not replace OneCRL which is a revocation list controlled by Mozilla.

The full action items can be read here. Responses to the survey will be automatically and immediately published by the CCADB.

With this CA Communication, we reiterate that participation in Mozilla’s CA Certificate Program is at our sole discretion, and we will take whatever steps are necessary to keep our users safe. Nevertheless, we believe that the best approach to safeguard that security is to work with CAs as partners, to foster open and frank communication, and to be diligent in looking for ways to improve.