From: ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)
To: Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>
Cc: 27437@debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#27437: Source downloader accepts X.509 certificate for incorrect domain
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2017 09:57:23 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87zid0qwt8.fsf@gnu.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20170622040901.GA8700@jasmine.lan> (Leo Famulari's message of "Thu, 22 Jun 2017 00:09:01 -0400")
Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> skribis:
> On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 12:50:15PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> skribis:
>> > While working on some package updates, I found that the source code
>> > downloader will accept an X.509 certificate for an incorrect site.
>
> [...]
>
>> IOW, since we’re checking the integrity of the tarball anyway, and we
>> assume developers checked its authenticity when writing the recipe, then
>> who cares whether downloads.xiph.org has a valid certificate?
>>
>> Does it make sense?
>
> Yeah, I think it makes sense if checking the certificates would add too
> much complexity for what I think is a minor benefit: protecting against
> exploitation of bugs by MITM (but not xiph.org) in whatever code runs
> after the connection is initiated and before the hash is calculated.
>
> Perhaps a MITM could send a huge file and fill up the disk or something
> like that.
I’m generally in favor of relying on X.509 certificates as little as
possible, and in this case, while I agree that it could protect us
against the scenario you describe, I think it’s a bit of a stretch.
However, we’d very likely have bug reports of people for which downloads
fail because of various issues in the X.509 infrastructure and/or in how
the they set up their system (‘nss-certs’ uninstalled or too old,
SSL_CERT_DIR unset, etc.)
Thoughts?
Thanks,
Ludo’.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2017-06-22 7:58 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 17+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-06-21 6:17 bug#27437: Source downloader accepts X.509 certificate for incorrect domain Leo Famulari
2017-06-21 10:50 ` Ludovic Courtès
2017-06-22 4:09 ` Leo Famulari
2017-06-22 7:57 ` Ludovic Courtès [this message]
2017-06-22 16:16 ` Leo Famulari
2017-06-22 15:33 ` Mark H Weaver
2017-06-22 16:11 ` Leo Famulari
2017-06-22 19:12 ` Ludovic Courtès
2017-06-23 0:45 ` Mike Gerwitz
2017-06-23 9:31 ` Ludovic Courtès
2017-06-22 21:30 ` ng0
2017-06-22 21:45 ` Ricardo Wurmus
2017-06-22 22:32 ` Marius Bakke
2017-06-23 3:24 ` Leo Famulari
2017-06-23 7:29 ` Ricardo Wurmus
2017-07-27 12:29 ` Ludovic Courtès
2017-07-27 19:34 ` Ricardo Wurmus
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
List information: https://guix.gnu.org/
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=87zid0qwt8.fsf@gnu.org \
--to=ludo@gnu.org \
--cc=27437@debbugs.gnu.org \
--cc=leo@famulari.name \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
Code repositories for project(s) associated with this public inbox
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).