Committee Meeting 2024-11-07 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 channel #board-meeting on the CAcert IRC network.

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.

<!> Normal Time: 19:00 UTC = 20:00 CET (Geneva) = 14:00 EST (New York)

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!
{i} 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
    2. {i} Who Secretary is making minutes ?

    3. {i} Take note of the acceptance of the minutes of the last meeting by the committee: https://motion.cacert.org/motions/m20241014.1

    4. Chair asks whether cacert-board-private or cacert-board maillist or Threema chat or Telegram group includes any items that need to be disclosed to Members.

    5. Agree on the 5th of December 2024, 19:00 UTC as date for the next committee meeting. (Following dates probably 2nd Jan. 2025, 6th of Febr., 6th of March 2025)

  2. Business
    1. OpenID Connect (Brian, Dirk)

    2. (!) "I see double" (Etienne)

      1. (see e-mail on board brivate mailing list from Sun, 13 Oct 2024 23:09:11 +0200 for further details)

    3. OrgA (Aleš, Alex, Dirk)

      1. How to change an OrgAssurer to an normal Assurer

      2. How to remove an OrgAssurer completely

      3. team lead?
      4. re-inforcement?
    4. Arbitration (Alex)

      1. state of arbitration (Arbitrators, Case Managers)
      2. re-inforcement?
    5. Infra/Soft (customer @Support list)

      1. {i} Mail Certificate Error Message: "The certificate revocation list required to verify the signing certificate is either not available or no longer valid."

      2. (!) How much effort would be involved if we provided a certificate revocation server to avoid the error message. (That would be a not insignificant building block to increase acceptance and trust in CAcert service.)

    6. Support Support (a) Prioritisation of the following tasks, (b) estimate time frame and (c) allocation (solution-testing-implementation) (from Aleš for Software)

      1. It is necessary to complete the LetsEncrypt support, as without it, CAcert becomes "untrustworthy".

      2. To delete accounts of users who are org-admins, any rule, arbitrator act, or a technical intervention is needed.
      3. To delete some accounts, the software repair should be completed.
    7. Any other business (board members forgot to ask the secretary to put it on the agenda)
  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. on hold (for later this year)
    1. Infrastructure: (Dirk)
      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

    2. Remote Assurance (Brian)

      1. {i} Creation of remote assurance sub committee (RASC) on the hold until Eva is available for the policy. Secretary got in touch with Eva on Oct. 12.
        "Users Requests, summarized." added by Aleš a) need for a distant assurance (no assurers, no TTP possibility in their country); b) need for the write access to our Wiki.


  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. {X} obsolete / (./) started / {OK} 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

    • {OK} 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

    • {X} 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

Person

Board-Private

Committee Archive

Wiki

Nextcloud

Brian

(./)

(./)

(./)

(./)

Etienne

Admin

Admin

(./)

(./)

Kim

(./)

(./)

(./)

(./)

Michael

X

(./)

<!>

(./)

Aleš

(./)

(./)

(./)

(./)

Dirk

(./)

?

(./)

?

Wacław

X

(./)

<!>

?

FrédéricD

X

(./)

(./)

Admin

FrédéricG

X

(./)

(./)

(./)

1. Tasks assigned to Board Members and others

Person

Task

Deadline

Other People Involved

Notes

Brian

Contact QA/QC Volunteers

10 January 2022

Gero Treuner, Peter Nunn, others?

To begin work, they do not need ABC.

Brian

bla

2022

xxx

xx.

Brian

bla

2022

xxx

xx.


  1. Software Team
    1. Issue 1502: Adapt the UI at CAcert.org to deal with the "keygen" feature having been removed in browsers (Some of this will be met with 1551 )

    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 - 2024-11-07

Present, by alphabetical order: Aleš, Brian, Dirk, Etienne, Kim

Opening

The president opens the Committee Meeting at 19:10. The committee agrees on the 5th of December 2024, 19:00 UTC as date for the next committee meeting. (Following dates probably 2nd Jan. 2025, 6th of Febr., 6th of March 2025)

Business

2.2. "I see double": It looks as they do much of the same we are. We want to learn more about them, maybe they can be integrated into c.o. As Dirk is allready in Spain, he will contact them and report the next month. Aleš and Kim subscribed in cognito to analyse the certs, maybe with Dirk and Jan.

2.6. From this 3 points, the third (software repair) is the most important, followed by the second (OrgA).

2.6.1. Letsencrypt: This has to be done for wiki and the blog, probably by Jan, but in the following order: (1) OpenID Connect, (2) Let's Encrypt.

2.6.2. Delete accounts with OrgA: this has to be documented publicly.

2.6.3. Software repair: Dirk will check if the needed coding is possible or not at the end of November. If it is not possible, he will communicate it.

2.3. OrgA: Alex is Admin, maybe he has some special rights. Dirk is OrgA for SecureU and CAcert. Bilateral solution.

2.4. Arbitration: CM: Eva, Support Eng. (Aleš, Dirk); Arb: Ted.

2.5.1. Revocation list: We have two OCSP servers; the CRL is not older than 1/2 day.

Infra: New testing machines with Debian 12 are coming (Jan). webdb1 and 2 have Debian 11 resp. 12

The president closes the meeting at 20:48.

Motions

Actions

Who

Status

Action

Minutemaker

wip

prepare Agenda and Minutes for the next meeting

Brian

Software meeting

every 2 month

Secretary

bank

accounts, contact with treasurer


Brain/CAcertInc/Committee/MeetingAgendasAndMinutes/2024-11-07 (last edited 2024-12-01 19:52:18 by EtienneRuedin)