Re: upstream source code authenticity checking

[Florian Weimer <fweimer () redhat com>]

On 04/25/2013 07:55 AM, Alistair Crooks wrote:
> So, all in all, what you have is a digest, signed by someone who knows
> the key, or who has access to the creds (if any) for the key, or who
> has found out the key creds, albeit with timestamp info for when the
> signature took place.
>
> I'm not sure what using PGP gains us?

We can tell that the new tarball passed through some of the same steps 
that the old tarball did.  It is better than just downloading it from 
the same site as before because some middlemen have already demonstrated 
that they can be unreliable, and the OpenPGP signature cuts them out. 
(Large source code hosting sites have been compromised, or serve their 
content exclusively over a mirror network which literally anyone can join.)

Merely looking for key continuity means that we don't have to wonder if 
"Rodent of Unusual Size" is authorized to spin new releases of Apache httpd.

--
Florian Weimer / Red Hat Product Security Team