On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 3:45 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 3:23 PM, Aaron Schaefer <aaron@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 3:35 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> Haven't we been over this like a hundred times? md5sums are not used >>> for security. Not ever. Nope. Nada. >>> >>> We use them solely to detect whether or not the download completed as >>> expected. And sha256 is going way overboard here. >> >> It has been discussed before, in fact, you said this back in November: >> >> "The checksums in pacman are only used for integrity, not security. I >> agree that the first step towards super-omg-secure packages would be >> switching to a different checksum, but sha1 might be deemed insecure >> soon too. Why not jump over that one to something like sha256?" >> >> ...so a month ago you didn't think sha256 was going overboard, and now >> you do? I'd also make a semantics argument and say that if the >> "integrity" of the package could possibly be compromised by the >> creation of a malicious package with the same md5 checksum, then that >> absolutely effects the "security" of our system...the two ideas are >> not completely separate. > > I do not recall my frame of mind at the time, but rereading that and > knowing how I talk/write, I'd say that may have been tongue-in-cheek. > > I guess the point I was making was that simply bumping the checksum > won't be the best solution because the NEXT choice may be labeled as > insecure and then the next and the next. > > To put it in different terms: if you have some array that only holds > 10 objects, and find out 10 isn't enough, you can bump it to 20. And > when you find out 20 isn't enough, you can bump it to 100... and then > 100 might not be enough... eventually, you're going to say "screw it" > and tackle the problem differently (dynamically sized array). > > There has been lots and lots of work done to get GPG signed packages > going on the pacman-dev list. Gerhard and Geoffroy, if I recall, kinda > took the helm on this one. If we go with this solution, we won't have > to play this game of cat-and-mouse with changing the checksums. And remember makepkg source checksums are COMPLETELY different than signed packages. I'm not even sure why these two are being mentioned in the same light. -Dan
