[Haskell-cafe] Improvements to package hosting and security

[Arian van Putten]

Without adding much to the discussion myself, I just want to drop this link
here: http://www.cs.arizona.edu/stork/packagemanagersecurity/ . It
addresses some interesting issues concerning package repositories.

Anyhow I personally think the current state of hackage (not even https) is
unacceptable and I'm really excited that people seem to be working on this.




On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 12:28 PM, Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com>
wrote:

> Also, since it's relevant, here's a Github repo with all of the cabal
> files from Hackage which (thanks to a cron job and Travis CI) automatically
> updates every 30 minutes:
>
> https://github.com/commercialhaskell/all-cabal-files
>
> On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 1:02 PM Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Many of you saw the blog post Mathieu wrote[1] about having more
>> composable community infrastructure, which in particular focused on
>> improvements to Hackage. I've been discussing some of these ideas with both
>> Mathieu and others in the community working on some similar thoughts. I've
>> also separately spent some time speaking with Chris about package
>> signing[2]. Through those discussions, it's become apparent to me that
>> there are in fact two core pieces of functionality we're relying on Hackage
>> for today:
>>
>> * A centralized location for accessing package metadata (i.e., the cabal
>> files) and the package contents themselves (i.e., the sdist tarballs)
>> * A central authority for deciding who is allowed to make releases of
>> packages, and make revisions to cabal files
>>
>> In my opinion, fixing the first problem is in fact very straightforward
>> to do today using existing tools. FP Complete already hosts a full Hackage
>> mirror[3] backed by S3, for instance, and having the metadata mirrored to a
>> Git repository as well is not a difficult technical challenge. This is the
>> core of what Mathieu was proposing as far as composable infrastructure,
>> corresponding to next actions 1 and 3 at the end of his blog post (step 2,
>> modifying Hackage, is not a prerequesite). In my opinion, such a system
>> would far surpass in usability, reliability, and extensibility our current
>> infrastructure, and could be rolled out in a few days at most.
>>
>> However, that second point- the central authority- is the more
>> interesting one. As it stands, our entire package ecosystem is placing a
>> huge level of trust in Hackage, without any serious way to vet what's going
>> on there. Attack vectors abound, e.g.:
>>
>> * Man in the middle attacks: as we are all painfully aware, cabal-install
>> does not support HTTPS, so a MITM attack on downloads from Hackage is
>> trivial
>> * A breach of the Hackage Server codebase would allow anyone to upload
>> nefarious code[4]
>> * Any kind of system level vulnerability could allow an attacker to
>> compromise the server in the same way
>>
>> Chris's package signing work addresses most of these vulnerabilities, by
>> adding a layer of cryptographic signatures on top of Hackage as the central
>> authority. I'd like to propose taking this a step further: removing Hackage
>> as the central authority, and instead relying entirely on cryptographic
>> signatures to release new packages.
>>
>> I wrote up a strawman proposal last week[5] which clearly needs work to
>> be a realistic option. My question is: are people interested in moving
>> forward on this? If there's no interest, and everyone is satisfied with
>> continuing with the current Hackage-central-authority, then we can proceed
>> with having reliable and secure services built around Hackage. But if
>> others- like me- would like to see a more secure system built from the
>> ground up, please say so and let's continue that conversation.
>>
>> [1]
>> https://www.fpcomplete.com/blog/2015/03/composable-community-infrastructure
>>
>> [2]
>> https://github.com/commercialhaskell/commercialhaskell/wiki/Package-signing-detailed-propsal
>>
>> [3] https://www.fpcomplete.com/blog/2015/03/hackage-mirror
>> [4] I don't think this is just a theoretical possibility for some point
>> in the future. I have reported an easily trigerrable DoS attack on the
>> current Hackage Server codebase, which has been unresolved for 1.5 months
>> now
>> [5] https://gist.github.com/snoyberg/732aa47a5dd3864051b9
>>
>
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-- 
Groetjes,

Arian
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