On Apr 13, 2017 14:17, "Paul Moore" <pmoore@redhat.com> wrote:

On Thu, Apr 13, 2017 at 5:08 PM, William Roberts
<bill.c.roberts@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Apr 13, 2017 14:05, "Paul Moore" <paul@paul-moore.com> 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.
>
> Sure possible, but not super plausible. You're putting some trust in the
> administration of that website to begin with.

Come one man, you're smarter than this :)

I only called out the malicious admin case, but there are other cases
where someone with malicious intent could tamper with the checksum.
Some quick examples: hacked webserver, MITM https proxy, etc.


It's all about trust, I could sign my tarballs and plop the private key
somewhere dumb. This is why pki is hard. There's always flaws, I consider
https + hash to be like a medium level of trust, and definitely an
improvement over nothing. Nothing will beat a signed blob, and we'll assume
Steve uses a smart card stored in a vault and only ever used for signing
releases with.


--
paul moore
security @ redhat