Joey Hess <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Goswin von Brederlow wrote: > > What can we do with deb signatures? > > > > For our current problem, the integrity of the debian archive being > > questioned, the procedure would be easy and available to every user: > > > > 1. get any clean Debian keyring (or just the key signing the keyring) > > 2. verify the latest Debian keyring > > 3. verify that each deb was signed by a DD and the signature fits > > The canoical attack against signed debs in this situation is to find a > signed deb on snapshot.debian.net that contains a known security hole. > Now inject it into the compromised archive, with a changed filename, and > edit the Packages file to have its md5sum. Now a user's checks will > succeed -- the package is signed with a developer's key -- but they will > install the old, insecure .deb. The only hint will be a warning from > dpkg that it is downgrading the package, and a clever attacker might > avoid even that.
How would you avoid it? If a compromise is suspected the Packages file can be recreated from the actual signed names and versions inside the deb. apt/dpkg can be made to check this before unpacking a deb too. > I would still like to be able to produce signed debs, it's another layer > of security, but they are no panacea. So far it looks like we just have to run debsigs on each way station to get a continous trust chain that is currently interruped at master when the changes files split out to the lists only. MfG Goswin