Hi there. I've talked to some people within Square and we're interested in creating a system for providing end-to-end integrity of RubyGems, as well as being able to revoke known compromised RubyGems while still surviving the compromise of system keys.
While the specific design goals are up for debate, we'd probably try to do a prototype implementation of The Update Framework on top of the existing RubyGems X.509 certificate system (with perhaps a few modifications): http://www.updateframework.com/projects/project The main goals would be: - Try to leverage as much of the existing work on signed RubyGems as possible - Depend only on the Ruby standard library and try not to pull in any additional dependencies that RubyGems doesn't already depend on - Produce a system with minimum (i.e. "zero") cost and operational overhead which would still provide practical security guarantees and could ensure all gems are signed (and also provide a way to retroactively sign all existing gems) If this sounds good to you, I'd love to talk more about fleshing out what we would actually implement during Hack Week so we can have a plan that lets us hit the ground running and get as much done as possible in a week, with the goal of having something worthwhile that can be merged into the upstream projects. We also have Dan Boneh as a staff cryptographer and can probably rope him in to review our design ;) -- Tony Arcieri _______________________________________________ RubyGems-Developers mailing list http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubygems RubyGems-Developers@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rubygems-developers