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Re: [Xen-devel] request to sign software

To: Joanna Rutkowska <joanna@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] request to sign software
From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2010 10:47:20 -0700
Cc: "xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Ian Jackson <Ian.Jackson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Keir Fraser <keir.fraser@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Stephen Spector <stephen.spector@xxxxxxxxxx>
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On 03/28/2010 03:02 AM, Joanna Rutkowska wrote:
Just a rather obvious request that you digitally sign all the published
tgz packages, as well as hg/git tags, so that it was possible to ensure
that the software I download from xen.org (or fetch from Jeremy's GIT)
is authentic. This is especially important for those people who would
like to build (and distribute!) their own products based on Xen.

Hopefully you can start doing this with the upcoming 4.0.0 and 3.4.3
versions of Xen, and the "official" pvops kernels (hopefully there will
be some pvops commit tagged as "official"? I assume from
xen/stale-2.6.32.x?)

(I prefer to call it "stable", but I can see how one might get them confused ;)

That's an interesting idea. But I don't think we have any infrastructure in place to make those signatures meaningful (ie, some way of usefully connecting a particular signature to a particular maintainer).

I guess the logical thing would be for xen.org to have a GPG cert, which could then sign our individual certs. (Or something. How does web of trust extend to "I'm confident this changeset is valid"?) Then its just a problem of how to propagate the xen.org cert in some way so that some way that everyone agrees is meaningful.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how much value such signatures would have. At the moment they would just certify "this is something I committed", but with not particular guarantees about any of the properties of that commit. Commits to the stable (or any branch, of either kernel or Xen) are really a matter of best effort, but they may still be broken, insecure, etc. Anyone using those trees bears some responsibility for making sure they meet their particular requirements (or delegate those qualification checks to someone they trust, like a distro).

If we added a specific meanings to tags (like, "this has passed automatic regression testing"), then adding a signature would perhaps be more meaningful. But that signature would presumably be added by the test infrastructure rather than a committer.

Signatures on tar files makes a bit more sense, because they don't have the backing of git/hg to guarantee the integrity of the file contents, but there's still the question of how to make those signatures meaningful.

    J

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