Leo Famulari <l...@famulari.name> skribis: > On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 12:50:15PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote: >> Leo Famulari <l...@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’.
