On 9/1/25 1:23 PM, Guillem Jover wrote:
* Make the format extensible to other signature formats or workflows (such as x509, secure-boot, IMA, etc., even if there's currently no intention to add support for any of this).
When we discussed support for IMA internally many years back we had no good answer for the key rotation problem. That feels very annoying with embedded signatures. You need to re-sign all the debs that you have in storage and need to get all signatures on disk updated - unless you generate immutable images that you can update all at once.
Maybe a timestamp countersignature and/or signature transparency would help authenticate the provenance even if the signature key leaked. At which point the question for me is if we are mostly talking about provenance, for which other systems are being invented - including tracking what went into the package, or if there is other value like IMA at runtime.
Kind regards Philipp Kern