Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:27:05 +0200 | From | "H. Peter Anvin" <> | Subject | Re: kernel.org tarball/patch signature files |
| |
On 10/25/2011 06:31 AM, Kyle Moffett wrote: > > Unfortunately, while there are "pristine-gz" and "pristine-bz2" tools, > there has not yet been developed a "pristine-xz" tool: > http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=499489 > > So it's not yet reasonably possible for the kernel.org archive, but > sometime in the future it might become so. >
There are a lot of strong reasons to NOT do so, however.
Any time we have something signed by a developer, we have something that is precious and cannot be replicated by kernel.org staff.
Any time we have something signed by a robot, we have something that people *will* misinterpret as having security properties that they don't -- this has unfortunately been amply shown.
Compression formats evolve over time; right now we're concerned with gz, bz2, and xz, but xz is brand new here and there may very well be new things in the future.
It would be a very good thing for people to develop tools to run compressors and decompressors in locked-down boxes. It should be possible to run these kinds of programs without access to either network or filesystem; only read from stdin and out on stdout (and presumably stderr for errors.) This would solve problems for much more than just kernel.org.
-hpa
| |