[Haskell-cafe] Ticking time bomb

[Vincent Hanquez]

On 01/31/2013 10:06 AM, Ertugrul Söylemez wrote:
> Joachim Breitner <mail at joachim-breitner.de> wrote:
>
>>> And that may even be more harmful, because an insecure system with a
>>> false sense of security is worse than an insecure system alone.
>>>
>>> Let's do it properly.
>> but don’t overengineer it either. Simply adding to hackage the
>> possibility to store a .asc file next to the tar.gz file that contains
>> the cryptographic signature would be a great start, and allow us to
>> develop a WoT model later on.
>>
>> (I try to resist from wondering whether this could go into hackage1 or
>> only hackage2, and in the latter case, whether that means that we
>> actually have the time to overengineer the system.)
>>
>> In fact, a lot would already be gained by a simple „warn if foo-2.0 is
>> signed with a different key than the version of foo already installed“
>> on cabal-install and people having a closer look at uploads from
>> different people. Not much infrastructure needed there.
> That was exactly my suggestion actually.  It requires the ability to
> make and check signatures.  The making can be done with external tools
> like GnuPG, but the checking has to be done by cabal-install.  To detect
> changed keys there also needs to be a trust database, which can be a
> simple directory in ~/.cabal/ where files are named after the
> fingerprint of the key it contains.
>
> The most important part is a sensible user interface.  The whole process
> should be invisible to the user, until there is a signature error.  The
> first installation of a package will actually generate a handful of
> signature errors, because the keys are not known yet.
>
> This shouldn't be too hard to implement and requires only a small change
> to Hackage and cabal-install's upload command to begin.

That's not a proper solution, and definitively in the warm fuzzy feeling 
department.

What if you install a package for the first time and this package has 
just been re-uploaded maliciously with a different key and a payload ?
What if you're relying on hackage mirrors, what stop this mirror to 
regenerate all signatures with a new key ?

It also make maintainers change difficult, and doing genuine 
non-maintainer upload.

-- 
Vincent