Podcast
Root Causes 446: Sectigo Assumes Five CABF Offices


Hosted by
Tim Callan
Chief Compliance Officer
Jason Soroko
Fellow
Original broadcast date
December 12, 2024
Tim has stepped into the position of vice-chair of the CA/Browse Forum, and Sectigo now holds five chair or vice-chair positions in that body. We explain how leadership is chosen, the offices Sectigo holds today, and some of our vision for CABF in the next two years.
Podcast Transcript
Lightly edited for flow and brevity.
So I'm now Vice Chairman of CA/Browser Forum. I also continued to have my seat as Vice Chairman of the Definitions in Glossary Working Group. So that's two, which I normally just refer to as DGWG. So if I say that, that's what that is. So that's two chairs. Martijn Katerbarg, you're my Associate here at Sectigo, is the Chairman of the Code Signing Working Group and he continues as Vice Chair of the S/MIME Working Group. And then lastly, our General Counsel, Brian Holland is Co-chair of the IPR group, the group the Intellectual Property Group. So those are five positions we hold at CA/Browser Forum and like I said, it's hard to get an official record of this, but from what I can tell, looking back at history, I do not think that any organization has had quite that many chairs all at once. So that's kind of exciting.
You and I have covered the CA/Browser Forum. You've covered it intensively on this podcast for quite a long time. And I'm really glad where it's going in terms of its really rational thinking. Its ability to think through problems and to get us ready for the future and that's good because the future is coming, and not the least of which are topics such as the shortening certificate lifespans and topics such as PQC.
Now, there's a bunch of working groups. We talked about a lot of them. The working groups do not have term limits on them, and they're also two years. The reason for that is because, it's not a huge organization, and there are different levels of participation, and there are lots of members of the organization that don't want to hold a chair. We determined a few years ago that if we force all of the working groups to cycle out their leadership every two years that that might generate a problem. There might be a difficulty getting qualified leaders who want to step in. If you'd rather have someone who's taking over the chair again, but they are passionate about driving, let's say the S/MIME working group, which is such a great example of that. If there's somebody who is really passionate about driving it, we don't want to deny that and have nobody or have somebody who isn't really going to work very hard at the job. So when you look at it that way, the decision was that the working groups can keep having the same Chairs, but for the main one, we need to cycle it out.

