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Date:      Tue, 6 Feb 2001 13:02:08 -0500 (EST)
From:      Garrett Wollman <wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
To:        Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com>
Cc:        freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Package integrity check?
Message-ID:  <200102061802.NAA33086@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <3A802FAF.792F61F5@softweyr.com>
References:  <20010205210459.A2479@acc.umu.se> <3A7F9AB6.5CAA983B@softweyr.com> <200102061526.KAA31832@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> <3A802FAF.792F61F5@softweyr.com>

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<<On Tue, 06 Feb 2001 10:09:03 -0700, Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> said:

> One of the signatures is a simple SHA1 crypto checksum, 
> that implies little other than you got what the package creator put 
> together to a fair degree of certainty.

Erm, no.  It implies that whomever last modified (read: trojaned) the
package knew enough to update the checksum.  This provides no
additional security, unless:

1) Whatever process generates and checksums the packages also makes
and signs a master list of all the checksums from each package, and

2) Whatever process installs software from the package compares its
checksum against this master list, and verifies the signature of the
master list.

I think that this would be both useful and worthwhile, but again, we
need to make sure that legally we are not promising anything other
than ``these packages have not been modified since generation''.

-GAWollman



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