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• 2023-11-02

• To Brain CAcert Inc. - CAcert.org Members Association - General Meetings - To Brain CAcert Inc. Committee Meeting Agendas & Minutes - Board's Project Overview - Current Action Items - last meeting - next meeting

Committee Meeting 2023-11-02 19:00 UTC

The meeting will take place at 19:00 UTC at https://meet.jit.si/cacert If you do not have audio channel, you may try in the IRC minutechannel #board-meeting on the CAcert IRC network.

Please note: The time will remain the same in Europe, please check for other regions of the world due to daylight saving time.

Feel free to add a business item within the acceptance period of 48 hours or your question to the board below. Non-committee members: the committee may choose to convert any business proposed as a question in the questions section.

Agenda

Signs that appear in the agenda
Formulated motion on your topic. It will be put to the vote. Adjustments may be made before the vote. A motion must be submitted for resolutions!
Information for your attention. Does not need to be explained or discussed at the meeting. Purpose: Everyone is up to date. (max. 10 seconds) Discussion topic with or with no decision.

1. Preliminaries
   1. Chair opens the Committee Meeting
      1. Chair has a question for the attending members
   2. Who is making minutes?

   3. Chair asks whether cacert-board-private or cacert-board maillist includes any items that need to be disclosed to Members.

   4. Accept minutes from 5. October 2023 "I move to accept the minutes of the committee meeting of 5th of October 2023."

2. Business

   Acceptance of new business items no later than 48 hours before the start of the committee meeting!

   1. AGM 2023 (Etienne): Saturday, 11th of November 2023 at 20:00 UTC.
      1. Annual report (President)
      2. Finance report (Treasurer)
      3. anything else?
      4. what is missiing?
   2. Infrastructure: Issues, intrventions (Dirk), rest do be skipt

      1. Critical/Hardware (Dirk): Signer and WebDB not reachable for now. Details see this blog post https://blog.cacert.org/2023/10/partially-restricted-operation-most-services-available/ (based on information given by JanDD in german)

      2. Signer - There are known issues with the signer. Some which need to be fixed and some that should not be fixed, as they aren't in line with how certificates should be used today (processes which have been incorrect for many years). Unfortunately, there are some old rules in CAcert documentation, specifically in the CPS, which seem to prohibit the necessary changes and improvements to the certificate creation and signing process. This means that the CPS, and perhaps other documentation needs to be rewritten, and some will require acceptance of the Policy group. A new version of documents need to be created and proposed, and when they are accepted, the necessary work on more correct processes can begin. A first draft has been created, and shared among Board and a few other active members.

         1. Start thinking about planning when to do things about new roots, so we are prepared several years in advance, as no certs should have a end-date after any root certificates. Also take a look at the old Escrow article. https://wiki.cacert.org/Roots/EscrowAndRecovery

      3. How is it going with implementing LetsEncrypt certificates on public facing services, instead of keeping them behind CAcert's "unknown" certificates?

   3. Finance team (Michael)

      1. Finance year 2022/23 ended on 30-06-2023. Finance Report: ready for the AGM (Michael)
      2. New ERP: Info: State of affairs (Frédéric D)

         1. If progress is not as expected: What is needed for the project to be completed successfully? Who from the board can support?

      3. Cause CAcert Inc. vs. PayPal Pte. Ltd. (Frédéric G./Etienne) (ClawbackAction)

      4. Alternative to PayPal payments for people not having access to IBAN/SEPA or to high fees or do not want use bank transfers: There is a possibility to pay with Visa, Mastercard, Google Pay, CB, iDeal, bancontact, CXpay, Conotoxia Wallet trough Conotoxia (regulated in Poland, European Union) for little fees.

   4. Education

      1. Discussion texts (board private)

   5. Mission & Future

      1. ??? Information about Wednesday conferences https://nextcloud.cacert.org/s/fnPyjC4X2MHbYBK

         1. ??? Do we need to change communication platform for the Wednesday meetings? Or are we happy with Jitsi, and regarding September as just unusually glitchy?

   6. OpenID Connect (Brian/Frédéric D)

      1. State of affairs openID project

      2. Report for RIPE: Report has been sent by the secretary. --> Has an update to be sent?

      3. Documentation (who?)

      4. Payment (1 done; 1 on hold, waiting for IBAN)

      5. PR (on hold: only if documentation is done)

         1. If progress is not as expected: What is needed for the project to be completed successfully? Who from the board can support?

   7. Remote Assurance (Brian)

      1. Creation of remote assurance sub committee (RASC) on the hold until Eva is available for the policy. Secretary got in touch wiht Eva on Oct. 12.

      2. If progress is not as expected: Should someone get in touch with Eva after FrOScon? Who?

   8. OrgAssurance

      1. Secretary got in touch with 10 Org Assurers. Goal 1: Reactivate training and supervision of candidates. Goal 2: maybe find a OrgA Of. To be continued in September.

   9. Background Check
      1. done

         1. BGC for Gero: Interview happened (by Ted&Etienne), committee is waiting for the report (has to be sent by Gero).

      2. pipeline

         1. BGC for Brian: who (no board member in BGC team! (Egal/JanDD) Brian has to re-contact the two checkers at 01 sept 2023.

         2. BGC for Peter is initiated. (date searching; Interview by Ted&Egal)

         3. BGC for Matthias are initiated. (date searching started in August 2022)

         4. BGC for Sascha are initiated. (language: en or de)

   10. Any other business (board members forgot to ask the secretary to put it on the agenda)
   11. Telegram - do we need to change the communication channel to something else, to get all Board members to, at least, read the communication there, but preferably also participate?
   12. What's coming next? ???
3. Question Time

   Questions from CAcert.org community members can be added until beginning of committee meeting! As well questions can be asked at "Question Time", without added question here.

   1. "Question One." added by Your Name Comment: Replace "Question One" by your Question and add your name

      • ..

1. Closing

1. Propose a date of the next Committee Meeting: 7. Dec 2023 19:00 UTC
2. Agree on the following meeting dates: 5. Jan, 1. Feb, 7. March 2024, 19:00 UTC; 4. April, 2. May, 6. June, 4. July 2024 18:00 UTC (keep date free, can be changed if necessary)

1. To remember: Goals 2021/2022 (propositions by board 2020/2021) - Each goal needs a responsible person on the board who keeps an eye on it and reports regularly, keeps in touch with the responsible people. obsolete / started / waiting for available time

   • push OrgA (Guy)
   • expand PR (Alex cannot do this, wants to hand over)

   • delivering the OpenID Connect integration, for which CAcert is funded by the RIPE NCC.

   • expand background check

   • remote assurance, if accepted by the community;

   • simplify the certificate creation (this enables the start of various projects from the pipeline)
   • software development and testing
   • New CSR software

   • support SecureU (find an active board member for them in Germany)

2. Not to forget: Staffing the teams
   1. Applicants to the Infrastructure team
   2. Applicants to the Development team
   3. Applicant to the Critical team

1. Access to local systems for board members

1. Tasks assigned to Board Members and others

1. Software Team

   1. Issue 1502: Adapt the UI at CAcert.org to deal with the "keygen" feature having been removed in browsers

   2. Issue 1482: Limit validity period of new HTTPS certificates to one year

   3. Issue 1444: PHP - Brian

   4. Issue 1417: Keygen / new CSR software - Bernhard

2. Organisation Assurance
   1. How to relance OrgA? (Guy)
3. Grant applications

   1. Protopype Fund https://prototypefund.de/en/ (mail to SW Board only)

      1. The Prototype Fund is a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). This is for residents of Germany only. We could create a group of people that work on a project for CAcert (with all support of the others in the background). It runs for two more years, every 6 month.
      2. Infra does not see any acute need at the moment, and does not have the capacity to provide qualified support.
      3. There are some ideas for software, but in infra's view there is still a lot of conceptual and preparatory work missing. What Infra could imagine is financing people to carry out a requirements analysis and write a requirements and test specification. This could then be used as a basis for a new implementation of the CAcert software (WebDB, Signer and perhaps other things like CATS). But these are just a few ideas of JanDD and he cannot currently recommend any people who would be suitable for this. Potential candidates would have to deal intensively with the existing software on the one hand and with the underlying policies on the other, and would have to identify a lot of missing information, ask for it and make assumptions for discussion. This requires very good analytical and communication skills and a high level of stamina.

1. Blockchain

   1. see here: https://wiki.cacert.org/Brain/CAcertInc/Committee/MeetingAgendasAndMinutes/2018-03-01/ideas#Blockchain (waiting for answer from IanG)

Minutes Committee meeting - 2023-11-02

Participants

Members of the Committee:

Present, by alphabetical order

Brian McCullough

Étienne Ruedin

Frédéric Dumas

Frédéric Grither

Kim Nilsson

Absent or silent, by alphabetical order

Michael Richardson

Members of the CAcert community and other guests

Having been active during the meeting, by alphabetical order

Dirk Astrath

1 Opening

From November 2023 to March 2024 inclusive, committee meetings will be held at 19:00 UTC.

Chair Brian opens the meeting at 19:10 UTC.

No urgent messages in the discussion lists that require immediate discussion.

The minutes of the meeting held on 10 September are submitted to the members of the committee for approval:

Result of the vote:

* Aye: 5 * Naye: 0 * Abstain: 0

The minutes of the last meeting are accepted.

2 Business

AGM 2023 (Étienne)

The Annual General Meeting will be held on Saturday, 11th of November 2023 at 20:00 UTC. Brian provides for the Chairman's report to be sent without delay, and Michael will draft the finance report before AGM too. Some members who incur high bank charges to pay their annual fee by bank transfer to CAcert's Graubündner Kantonalbank account in euros have the option of making this payment via Conotoxia.

Infrastructure (Dirk)

Dirk reports about technical issues and why things aren't working. To remedy the problem partially remotely, pending the next physical visit to the datacentre, the files for CAcert's main web application were reinstalled on another partition. The Class 3 Root certificate was not copied. As a result, this certificate is not currently available online for users to download. Dirk has put this certificate back online.

It is anticipated that the resumption of the generation of client certificates signed by Class 3 Root could take place around 10 November, while the resumption of signatures by Class 1 Root will be completed at a later date, once Dirk has diagnosed the cause of the malfunction relating specifically to Class 1 Root.

Kim mentions that there has been a copy of the old Certification Practice Statement shared among Board and other active members to start the work towards a CPS which doesn't hinder future development and fixing of current issues. Among other things, CPS document describes the uses for which the various CAcert certificates are intended. Until the CPS is revised, the Class 1 root certificate can continue to be used by CAcert members to sign their newly created or renewed client certificates. It is recommended that the work to revise the CPS should be started by the next CAcert committee before the end of this calendar year, and also start planning for creating new roots.

The project initiated in October 2022 to replace CAcert certificates with Let'sEncrypt certificates on certain CAcert public web services is still on track. This migration has not yet been undertaken.

Finance (Étienne/Frédéric G)

Frédéric G has not yet been able to gain access to the Swiss Paypal account with Michael's help. This is blocking any possibility for Frédéric to move forward with the dispute with PayPal Singapore. As a result, the funds frozen during the transfer from the WestPac accounts to the GKB are still frozen by Paypal.

Étienne described alternative ways (through Conotoxia) for people to send money to CAcert, as CAcert has been having issues with PayPal continuously for a long time.

Background Check by Community (Dirk)

Brian and Dirk are hoping to complete Brian's BGC before Christmas 2023.

3 Question Time

An alternative to Telegram is discussed for daily written contact between committee members. Frédéric G suggests using Talk on Nextcloud.

Closing

Chair Brian closes the meeting at 21:10 UTC.

Date of the next meeting

Apart from the Annual General Meeting, scheduled for 11 November 19:00 UTC, the next meeting will be held on Thursday December 7, 2023 at 19:00 UTC

Motions

• https://motion.cacert.org/motions/m20230915.1 (Information of members)

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