oss-sec mailing list archives
Re: upstream source code authenticity checking
From: Allan McRae <allan () archlinux org>
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2013 08:26:51 +1000
On 21/04/13 06:39, Solar Designer wrote:
Hi, I just found this recent blog post by Allan McRae of Arch Linux: http://allanmcrae.com/2012/04/how-secure-is-the-source-code/ Thank you for doing this, Allan! Are you contacting the upstream authors to request that they start to properly sign their releases? (I've been doing that on some occasions, sometimes with success.)
I have for a couple, but nothing across the whole board.
I think that placing both "MD5 checksum provided on same site as download" and "PGP signature, key difficult to verify" in the same "yellow" category is inconvenient for us. "MD5 checksum provided on same site as download" only helps verify downloads from mirrors against the master site, whereas "PGP signature, key difficult to verify" achieves a lot more - once a distro is already including the package (and has already taken the risk of it having been tampered with), then verifying further updates to the package becomes almost as reliable as it would have been with proper signing (with a "readily verifiable" key). So we need four categories, or simply "MD5 checksum provided on same site as download" should be in "red", not in "yellow".
I had yellow as "at least they tried...". The could be categorised in other ways, but that was a really quick survey of some core Linux software, so I did not put that much thought into it. Allan
Current thread:
- upstream source code authenticity checking Solar Designer (Apr 20)
- Re: upstream source code authenticity checking Alan Coopersmith (Apr 21)
- Re: upstream source code authenticity checking Marcus Meissner (Apr 21)
- Re: upstream source code authenticity checking Jeremy Stanley (Apr 21)
- Re: upstream source code authenticity checking Allan McRae (Apr 21)
- Re: upstream source code authenticity checking Alistair Crooks (Apr 21)
- Re: upstream source code authenticity checking Allan McRae (Apr 21)
- Re: upstream source code authenticity checking Alistair Crooks (Apr 21)
- Re: upstream source code authenticity checking Stuart Henderson (Apr 22)
- Re: upstream source code authenticity checking Allan McRae (Apr 21)
- Re: upstream source code authenticity checking Eric H. Christensen (Apr 24)
- Re: upstream source code authenticity checking Alistair Crooks (Apr 24)
- Re: upstream source code authenticity checking Allan McRae (Apr 24)
- Re: upstream source code authenticity checking Kurt Seifried (Apr 25)
- Re: upstream source code authenticity checking Daniel Kahn Gillmor (Apr 25)
- Re: upstream source code authenticity checking Alistair Crooks (Apr 25)
- Re: upstream source code authenticity checking Alistair Crooks (Apr 24)
- Re: upstream source code authenticity checking Alan Coopersmith (Apr 21)