Making cabal-install SSL capable

Herbert Valerio Riedel hvriedel at gmail.com
Tue Apr 28 14:32:06 UTC 2015


On 2015-04-28 at 15:50:26 +0200, Michael Snoyman wrote:

[...]

>> PS: We shouldn't forget that there's also an existing deployed
>>     cabal-install user-base we can't get rid off so easily, which may
>>     still leak unencrypted basic-auth credentials for the years to
>>     come. Just saying...

> I agree on that front. I think that Hackage should turn away all uploads
> that aren't TLS-secured, and should make that change ASAP.

Well, even if you do that, you can only reject the upload-request
*after* the http client has already leaked the basic-auth credentials
over a non-secured http channel... :-/

So the only thing this measure would buy us IMHO is that CLI users would
get an incentive to upgrade their cabal-install tooling (if they use
e.g. `cabal upload`), but it wouldn't protect against accidentally
falling back to an older cabal-install version picked up by accident
(and then again compromising the credentials). I.e. this measure on its
own wouldn't remove the unsecured basic-auth eavesdropping attack-window
completely, only make it smaller.

Cheers,
  hvr


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