On Thu, June 27, 2013 22:16, Daniel Pocock wrote: > On 27/06/13 21:44, Florian Weimer wrote: >> * Daniel Pocock: >> >>> However, are such issues at the discretion of package maintainers and >>> upstream, or is it useful to have a uniform Debian approach to >>> cryptographic strength? >> >> Keep in mind that RFC 4880 (OpenPGP) hard-codes SHA-1 in several >> places, notably for key fingerprints. If there's a uniform strength >> requirement, we need some weasel words that GnuPG remains compliant. >> >> It's also unclear if SHA-256 or SHA-512 is stronger, and if either >> really is that much better than SHA-1. > > Just to clarify, although my query was related to the use of this hash > in GnuPG, the reason for the email on debian-devel is for the > system-wide policy on hashes: which could mean any package (e.g. git > uses SHA-1 too, some of the X.509 root certs use an SHA-1 hash) > > The first question then - do we even need to care, as a project, about > being pro-active? Or just leave it at the discretion of derivatives and > end-users to make their own policies? That's quite OK as long as this > approach is documented. The security page[1] says "Debian takes > security very seriously" and some users may ask how we apply that > philosophy to SHA-1 given that it is on various alerts[2]. > > It may be that we say "Some packages include SHA-1 technology and if the > attack potential crosses some threshold X the security team will not > support them." Then it is up to maintainers and upstreams to think > about and start making plans for the future of their packages.
I think such decisions are indeed best left to individual package maintainers as there's in my opinion no one sound advice that works for all cases. While moving away from SHA-1 right now might make sense in some cases, in others it's still problematic. You name X.509: CA roots are by and large not moving away from SHA-1; you name GnuPG: SHA-1 is indeed in the standard and signing stuff with non-SHA-1 hashes still leads to compatibility issues which make that there's a good case for keeping the current default. Although deprecation is good, there's also still doubt on where to migrate to. Per-package decisions are hence a much more suited approach than archive-wide policies. Cheers, Thijs -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/97b001594faa6654df2bfe01109ef981.squir...@aphrodite.kinkhorst.nl
