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sm-commit - Re: [SM-Commit] GIT changes to master grimoire by David Kowis (c72b87955457935554592ab0a35869099c83f750)

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  • From: Remko van der Vossen <wich AT stack.nl>
  • To: sm-commit AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Commit] GIT changes to master grimoire by David Kowis (c72b87955457935554592ab0a35869099c83f750)
  • Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2008 17:02:17 +0100

On Sunday 20 of January 2008 23:56:00 Ladislav Hagara wrote:
> BTW, we still can't detect similar changes if sources are signed only by
> their developers (vendor signed spell).
> I know we can add their signatures into spells but we don't do it.

What do you mean? There are quite a number of spells that are checked on
the upstream PGP signature and public PGP key in the grimoire.

We have to trust the developers, we simply don't have the time to audit
each and every package thoroughly we add or update. What we want to
protect our users from, is man in the middle attacks where the tarball
on the web is replaced with a tarball containing malicious code.

Of course it can still happen that a developer will inject malicious
code into a new release of the package, but this is much, much less
likely and of course the developer in question will never ever be
trusted by anyone again, so assuming they want to keep their reputation
and want to be able to release software in the future they won't do such
a thing.

Nothing is risk free, even if we were to audit each and every package
thoroughly on each update, there could still be some among us which can
inject malicious code, the only wat to be a 100% sure is to have every
end-user audit all the code on their machine but given the time required
for such this is simply impossible. What we want to do is provide our
users with a reasonable amount of security with a reasonable amount of
time and effort on our part.

Regards, Remko.

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