Hi!
(This email is a copy of a Trac ticket I've just submitted,
https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/13346 , in an effort to encourage discussion)
Over at pidgin.im, we've recently been upgrading our distribution
systems to minimise the possibility of MITM attacks against our
downloads.[1][2] While www.openwrt.org, openwrt.org, dev.openwrt.org,
forum.openwrt.org, git.openwrt.org and lists.openwrt.org are available
on https[3], downloads.openwrt.org is not available without triggering a
browser security warning (as it's noton the listof certificate hosts).
With the release of AA-RC2, it occurred to me that OpenWRT is
susceptible to similar possible attacks. I also note that the
certificate is set to expire in about 3 months time, it would be great
to see downloads.openwrt.org added to the certificate's common names, as
well as firmware only distributed over https (ie, turn off http downloads).
Further, OpenWRT provides MD5 checksums for it's images. MD5 is known to
be not collision resistant.[4]
It is also known that it's possible to create files that have the same
MD5 value.[5][6]
To paraphrase CMU Software Engineering Institute, MD5 should no longer
be used.[7]
To paraphrase NIST, please move to SHA-2.[8]
Given the place that OpenWRT sits in people's networks, I would strongly
encourage the development team to consider moving the download system to
forcing HTTPS connections and ditching MD5 for SHA-2.
Regards,
Pete.
[1] https://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/15277
[2] http://pidgin.im/pipermail/devel/2013-April/011214.html
[3]
https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html#hostname=downloads.openwrt.org
[4] http://merlot.usc.edu/csac-f06/papers/Wang05a.pdf
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5#cite_note-autogenerated1-4
[6] http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~jrblack/papers/md5e-full.pdf
[7] http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/836068
[8] http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/hash/policy.html
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