From: "Bill Davidsen" <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, 2008, September 05 06:59
Jeff Spaleta wrote:
If you want to be security paranoid concerning the validity of the new
key when it becomes available.. go right ahead.. be paranoid about it.
But if you need 3rd parties to sign off on the key before you use it,
then you should already have been talking to 3rd parties about doing
it for the last Fedora key. Talk to the 3rd parties.. get them to
agree to sign the new key and put the detached signatures somewhere
public.
This is a (hopefully) one-time problem, and therefore it probably
doesn't need a perfect, automated, runs-by-itelf solution. And my
assumption has been that some people at other repositories do personally
know and interact with official people in the Fedora project, and that
there is an out-of-band way to pass information to the people at some
other repository. Given the nature of the problem, that could mean
carrying a CD a hundred miles to meet with someone who is personally
known to you from a presentation, etc, etc. It need not be pretty, let's
assume that this is a one-time problem.
The the other repository creates an RPM, containing not the key, but the
RPM created by Fedora, signed appropriately, which in turn contains the
new key, and distributes an RPM which installs an RPM, which rpm (the
program) now knows how to handle. So instead of signing a key, they
create and sign an RPM which itself contains an RPM, which can be
manually installed by the cautious.
Does that satisfy the technical issues you raised? It's what I had in
mind initially, when I proposed a secure means of distributing the
information. I know it's ugly, but it's a one night stand.
Psssst - come over here in the corner while I whisper in your ear about
companies like Verisign. That WOULD solve the problem. It would also
violate the Open Source concept of Fedora upsetting the purists.
If you download initially from Fedora then you either trust the connection
today or you do not. And some mechanism needs to be invented that can
declare "trust old key for items dated older than XXX. After that trust
only this new key until YYY, after which you will need an even newer key."
That's probably the infrastructure improvements they mumbled about in
their status reports.
{^_-}
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