signed tarballs

[Steve Grubb]

On Thursday, April 13, 2017 6:45:55 PM EDT William Roberts wrote:
> On Apr 13, 2017 14:22, "Christian Rebischke" <Chris.Rebischke at archlinux.org>
> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Apr 13, 2017 at 05:05:36PM -0400, Paul Moore wrote:
> > Unless Steve has exclusive administrative access to people.redhat.com
> > (I think it is safe to say he does not, but correct me if I'm wrong
> > Steve <b>) you can't trust an unsigned checksum regardless of how
> > strong the https cert/crypto as the web admin could still tamper with
> > the data.
> 
> We are not only talking about the web admin. We live in times where
> governments can easily tamper such data and the documents from snowden
> and some other whistleblowers prove that they did stuff like this.
> 
> The only way to make sure that the tarball is the original tarball is
> with a signature from Steve grubbs gpg-key. This would ensure that steve
> has checked the content.
> 
> Just imagine the following scenario:
> 
> 1. New audit version
> 2. Steve uploads the new version with new hash to the webserver.
> 
> 3. Let's imagine that hackers would MITM my connection or modify the
> server content. They could deploy a new tarball and generate a new
> checksum for it, because SHA256 is just *one* factor. Everyone who would
> download the new tarball would check against the new malicious hash.
> 
> This is a valid attack scenario.. This scenario could only be prevent by
> using signed tarballs. Because people like me and other distribution
> maintainers would have Steves pubkey. If somebody would modify the
> tarball he would need Steves pubkey. And this is much more difficult
> than just MITM the connection or tampering the data on the webserver.
> 
> With a signed tarball the attacker would have following problems:
> 
> 1. the attacker can't deploy a malicious tarball without signature,
> because this would make clear that the tarball is malicious.
> 2. if the attacker would generate an own signature for the maliciois
> tarball, people who verify the tarball would get a warning because the
> key is unknown and not part of steves keyring.
> 
> I hope this email is clearer...
> 
> 
> You're assuming a lot for an attack to happen, and your assuming a state of
> steves security of his key, his repo, etc at release time. Pki is based on
> trust of confidentiality of the private key. If Steve starts signing the
> tarballs, it would be great (everyone should), but https + hash is better
> then nothing, that's my point. The difference really boils down to trust of
> the key, admin vs Steve. Admin vs Steve is much better than united vs Steve
> ;-).

Indeed. I think the most plausible issue anyone would ever run across is the 
bugs that I may have inadvertently put in the code base rather than a MITM at 
the very second a distro is downloading a new release. How closely is anyone 
checking this code? Any fuzzers? Static analysis? Test suites?  :-) 

I understand the desire for source integrity. We'll go with hashes now and 
work up to signing another day. Meanwhile...how about some bug reports? Trust 
me. They are there.

-Steve