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• 2023-10-05

• 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 2023-10-05 18:00 UTC

The meeting will take place at 18:00 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

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 7. September 2023 "I move to accept the minutes of the committee meeting of 7th of September 2023."

2. Business

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

   1. Infrastructure

      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.

         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 LetEncrypt certificates on public facing services, instead of keeping them behind CAcert's "unknown" certificates?

      4. The next visit will be after october 12th.

   2. Finance team (Michael)

      1. 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?

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

      3. Finance year 2022/23 ended on 30-06-2023.

   3. Education

      1. Discussion texts (board private)

   4. 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?
   5. AGM 2023 (Etienne)

      1. "I move that the AGM will be held at Saturday, 11th of November 2023 at 20:00 UTC."

   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 (on hold; secretary has asked 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.

      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: 6. July 2023 18:00 UTC
2. Agree on the following meeting dates: 3. Aug., 7. Sept., 5. Oct. 2023 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 - 2023-10-05

Participants

Members of the Committee:

Present, by alphabetical order

Brian McCullough

Étienne Ruedin

Frédéric Dumas

Frédéric Grither

Kim Nilsson (present from 19:20 UTC)

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

none

1 Opening

From April to October 2023 inclusive, committee meetings will be held at 18:00 UTC.

Chair Brian opens the meeting at 18:15 UTC.

Frédéric D. invites everyone to join the livepad on Nextcloud for collaborative note-taking of our minutes.

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

The minutes of the meeting held on 14 September are submitted to the members of the committee for approval:

Result of the vote:

Aye: 4 Naye: 0 Abstain: 0

Absent: 1

The minutes of the last meeting are accepted.

2 Business

Class 1 Root (Kim)

Kim explained what needs to be done with the documentation (specifically the CPS) to make it possible to fix the signer and make sure future changes of the signer aren't restricted by the documentation. Kim will start the process by copying and adjusting the old CPS. The new document will then have to be proposed through the Policy Group.

Finance team - Paypal litigation (Frédéric G)

Because of double factor authentication security, the simultaneous presence of Michael and Frédéric G. is required to give Frédéric G. access to our Paypal account. Thus, Frédéric will be able to extract our arguments and proceed to the legal dispute with Singapore Banking Authority. Frédéric was hoping the presence of Michael tonight to succeed to the connection. Frédéric will try to reach Michael in the following days and arrange with him his access of our Paypal account.

As a by-product, not directly related to the finance topic, Frédéric and Michael used a confidential channel to send the Paypal account credentials without using a public messaging software like Whatsapp, Signal nor Telegram that Frédéric can't legally use. In a nutshell, our Nextcloud instance offers a communication feature named "TALK". This feature provides voice calls, video calls, conference calls and instant messaging. Since it is internal of our Nextcloud and, therefore, limited to valid users only, this communication channel is safe enough for our current needs.

Finance team - ERPNext (Frédéric D)

With regard to the progress of the ERPNext deployment, Frédéric D. presented the document that will serve as the basis for automating its deployment and maintenance using Ansible. He underlined the adjustments to be made to deploy the application on Debian 12.

Brians' background check

Brian has spoken to Dirk about a date to carry out his background check; he hopes to have this done before the end of the year.

Date of the Annual General Meeting.

The date of the Annual General Meeting is proposed to be 11 November 2023 at 19:00 UTC. This date is subject to acceptance by the Committee:

Result of the vote:

Aye: 5 Naye: 0 Abstain: 0

The date of the Annual General Meeting is adopted.

3 Question Time

No further questions were raised.

Closing

Chair Brian closes the meeting at 19:35 UTC.

Date of the next meeting

The next meeting will be held on Thursday November 2, 2023 at 19:00 UTC

Motions

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

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