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• 2025-01-02

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Committee Meeting 2025-01-02 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 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.

Agenda

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1. Preliminaries
   1. Chair opens the Committee Meeting

   2. Who Secretary is making minutes ?

   3. Accept minutes from 5. Dec. 2024 "I move to accept the minutes of the committee meeting of 5th of Dec 2024."

   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 6th of February 2025, 19:00 UTC as date for the next committee meeting. (Following dates probably, 6th of March 2025)

2. Business

   1. OpenID Connect (Brian, Dirk)

      1. Last steps: by ? (lead) and ? (help) until ?
      2. Documentation: by ? (lead) and ? (help) until ?

   2. "I see double" (Etienne)

      1. Result of analysis from Aleš, Kim, Dirk, Jan
      2. Maybe report of meeting/call Dirk in Spain
      3. Next steps

   3. OrgA (Alex, Etienne)

      1. reactivaction, admin rigths

   4. Support Support

      1. OpenID @wiki & @blog (who shares infos with secretary)

      2. Let's Encrypt @wiki & @blog (who is in charge, who shares infos with secretary)

      3. To delete accounts of users who are org-admins, any rule, arbitrator act, or a technical intervention is needed. --> next steps following Aleš

      4. To delete some accounts, the software repair should be completed. --> Report of Dirks investigation. --> next steps following Aleš

   5. CAcert Youth Projects (2.5 in December 2024) -- no information this month.

   6. 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. 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. 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 (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 - 2025-01-02

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

Opening

The president opens the Committee Meeting at 19:10. The minuts of the last meeting were accepted (m20250102.1). The committee agrees on the 30th of January 2025, 19:00 UTC as date for the next committee meeting. (Following dates probably 6th of March, 3rd of April, 1st of May 2025)

Business

2.1. OpenID Connet: Dirk found an old CAcert colleague S.T. at the Chaos Congress who wants to help with the documentation, PHP and Python. A first step is roll out at all CAcert systems. Every customisation is published and can be reused, e.g. Mantis (bug tracker), WordPress (blog), Moinmoin (wiki).

2.2. "I see double": The Spanish competition doesn't seem to be particularly usefull for us. Except in the area of organisations, which we were unable to test anonymously, in case there is a valid alternative or supplement to OrgA. Next steps: Contact us. Our name, which has been established for over two decades - also in Spain, cannot be used. Possibilities: Change name (them); collaboration/integration (as we have adopted Thawke): We offer their users more advanced certificates and their man/people complement our teams. The secretary writes a draft to be discussed on internal channels.

2.3. OrgA: Etienne is in touch with Alex. Details not discussed yet.

2.4.1. OpenID @wiki & @blog; more will come -> see 2.1.

2.4.2. Let's Encrypt @wiki & @blog: Let's encrypt for public-facing sites (wiki and blog) has long been desired. It should be noted that these certificates must be replaced every 90 days. Automation is not trivial. JanDD has ideas, but OpenID Conect has priority. It will be looked at when OpenID Connect access is installed after FOSDEM. Dirk wants to report in more detail in March (possibly as early as the end of January?).

2.4.3. Delete accounts with OrgA and Software repair: Aleš sends the e-mail-address of the corrupt accounts to Dirk by a secure way from the old computer on January 3rd; Dirk will analyse it and gives him an answer, how to proceed.

2.4.4. CPS: Aleš did a lot of work. see http://alkas.org/CPS-WIP/ Dirk will discuss the draft with a former arbitrator (E.S.) and give a resumee until January 10th. After that, a discussion may hopefully start at PolG.

2.5. Youth: nothing this month.

2.6.1. New roots: At the Chaos Congress it was suggested to create two subroots when renewing the root certificate, one for assured users and one for unassured users. Dirk will discuss this with JanDD.

2.6.2. FOSDEM: CAcert is there at the info desk (look out for CubeOS T-shirts with CAcert jackets!

The president closes the meeting at 20:08.

Motions

• https://motion.cacert.org/motions/m20250102.1 (minutes december)

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