On Wed, Nov 1, 2017 at 3:26 PM Kevin Fenzi <ke...@scrye.com> wrote:

> On 10/31/2017 01:08 PM, Christopher wrote:
> >
> > Why wouldn't the keys have expiration dates, following best practices? An
> > expired key is a bit friendlier of a nudge off of using outdated and
> > unsupported RPMs than a revoked key, which indicates a potential
> > compromise. I would expect any GPG keys for Fedora versions older than
> > EOL+5 or EOL+10 years to have already expired. Is that not the case?
>
> nope. It's not the case and it also largely doesn't matter.
>
> So, a few facts to toss on the thread:
>
> * All our keys that have been generated by sigul (which I think is all
> of them, the only exceptions used to be EPEL-4 and EPEL-5 which are both
> retired now) don't set expiration dates.
>
>
Is it possible to change that behavior?


> * EPEL-5's key did have a 10 year expiration, and did expire early this
> year before it went end of life. Turns out the only thing that cared
> about that was sigul. yum doesn't check, rpm doesn't check, they happily
> keep using the expired key.
>
>
I think that's what's being proposed to be fixed. rpm and/or yum should
check.
I'm actually not sure I'm on board with that idea, though, because as you
point out further down, the old releases are still served in mirrors, and
could still be in use. I'm more concerned about following best practices to
set expiration dates, so that a key cannot be used past a certain date to
continue to sign new artifacts, unintentionally. Extremely long-lived keys
increase the liklihood that they are using older generation algorithms
which could be broken, weak algorithms, or simply due to their age they're
old enough to have been brute-forced. I don't know that we should do
anything on the verification or cleanup end of things, but setting an
expiration date seems reasonable to me.


> * I've tried to sign the Fedora gpg keys in the past, but I'm really not
> sure it's worth it. IMHO gpg is kind of a dead end. It's hopelessly
> complex, no one bothers to use the web of trust as it was intended, it
> integrates very poorly with everything and only geeks use it.
>
>
One might argue that only geeks use Fedora or Linux in general, so I'm not
sure that's much of a relevant point. The fact is GPG is used to sign RPMs,
which are used by Fedora, so using GPG well is still relevant.


> * Currently we don't do anything to make things difficult for EOL users.
> When a release goes EOL we archive it, but we continue to serve it in
> mirrormanager (now pointing to the archives) and we don't do anything
> with the keys. If we wish to do something like this, it should likely be
> a decision for FESCo and/or the Council. Changing this may annoy a large
> number of people. :)
>
>
I think setting EOL+10 year expiration date would probably annoy nobody if
the verification simply produced a warning about age and didn't actually
cause anything to fail.


> I personally don't see much advantage in expiring old keys or the like.
> The only attack vector I can see is tricking someone into installing a
> package from an EOL release with a known vulnerablity, but if you can do
> that you likely can get them to just download it and install it or
> download your resigned package and have them accept the key or any
> number of things.
>
>
Yeah, that's the attack vector I was thinking. It's also the case that
somebody could be tricked into installing an older version of a patched
package from the current release, which is signed by the same GPG key. So,
maybe it's not much of a mitigation of anything. Still, I think adding a
reasonable expiration date is good practice... and warning during
verification (or making a verification policy configurable in yum/dnf)
might be a good idea.
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