On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 7:00 AM, Teran McKinney <sega01@gmail.com> wrote:
I like the idea of GPG signed repositories, but they are just about useless if they are signing MD5s. MD5 is very insecure, but good for normal file integrity checking. Can Pacman use SHA-256 or similiar? Another thing to watch out for is malicious publication of old repositories with old and vulnerable packages that have the force option set. I've thought briefly on how to circumvent this, but not enough to have a method I would purpose.
I think you misunderstood completely- try reading this first: http://archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2008-December/009244.html We sign *packages*, not repositories. Will this damn thing about MD5 please die? "Fixing" that still fixes nothing, and I'll pay one million USD to someone that can actually forge a package with a given MD5. I believe I addressed the old repositories question there as well- we will eventually have to sign databases too. A lot of thought was done in this report: http://www.cs.arizona.edu/people/justin/packagemanagersecurity/ -Dan