Subject: [Trans] I'm sorry to do this to you all, but: section 4.2, again.

From: Al Cutter <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2017 19:22:41 +0000

Hi all,

I was trying to help (honest!) Rob Stradling with the outstanding AD
comments from ekr on -bis27, and so we took an easy starter for 10:
    [ekr] *"Why is this a 2119 MUST? It seems wise, but not necessarily a
conformance requirement"*
in regards to Section 4.2:

> "To avoid being overloaded by invalid submissions, the log MUST NOT accept
> any submission until it has verified that the certificate or precertificate
> was submitted with a valid signature chain to an accepted trust anchor.

FWIW I agree with ekr on this (it's a policy statement, and, I believe, a
potentially dangerous one to encode as an RFC MUST) and managed to persuade
Rob of the same (at least that's what he said at the time), so he kindly
put together a PR to change that MUST NOT to a SHOULD NOT:
https://github.com/google/certificate-transparency-rfcs/pull/289

Apparently not everyone sees it quite so clearly, and there's been a bit of
a discussion on the PR, so in the interests of Transparency I wanted to
call it out here too in case there's anybody who was not already aware of
the PR and wants to get involved, again, on this well worn and comfy topic.

Cheers,
Al.