Hi,

However we decide to continue with the SigningService topic in the medium and 
longrun, I wanted to have one more go at unblocking the following PR in the 
short run:


https://github.com/pulp/pulpcore/pull/659


Currently, this PR issues a warning whenever the hash of a signing service 
script has changed on disk (compared to when it was first validated).


I think we are all in agreement that this is a bad compromise between doing 
nothing at all (since the script might have changed for legitimate reasons), 
and issuing a full on Error in cases where things are broken.



My proposal is the following:


Instead of issuing a warning, a changed hash value on disk would trigger an 
automatic re-validation of the script on disk.

If the validation fails, it will throw a hard error (which would certainly be 
the correct course of action for a script that does not perform what the 
SigningService promises).

If the validation succeeds, the SigningService is updated with the new hash 
value, and everything continues as it nothing had happened (we just assume the 
script was changed for legitimate reasons).

The only thing I can come up with where this approach might be problematic, is 
if users want to have different versions of the signing service script on 
different workers (for some reason).

However, in such cases it would still be possible to work around the problem by 
having a single signing service script call a secondary script that differs on 
different workers.


If you are worried that the possibility of such a workaround defeats the whole 
purpose of hashing the script in the first place, consider the following:

This is not intended as a security feature against some kind of malicious 
attacker scenario, it is intended to provide some more meaningful error 
reporting, for operational mistakes.

In this context I almost consider it a bonus if Sysadmin users who want to do 
something rather unusual and complicated (different signing service scripts on 
different workers) are forced to think about this carefully.


Where to go from here:

If we can get some kind of agreement that we would be willing to merge the 
version of the above PR that I have proposed, I would ask Manisha to make the 
relevant changes and they could be reviewed and merged.
This would not prevent us from taking SigningServices into an entirely 
different direction in the future.

thanks,
Quirin (quba42)
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