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Date: Sun, 21 Apr 2013 22:13:08 +0000
From: Jeremy Stanley <fungi@...goth.org>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: upstream source code authenticity checking

On 2013-04-21 10:05:53 -0700 (-0700), Alan Coopersmith wrote:
[...]
> If there was a common standard, with instructions, we'd be far more
> likely to spend the time to adopt it, than just a "make signatures
> appear somewhere, in an unspecified format".

For my own software I've been providing detached signatures of every
release tarball, along the lines of:

    gpg --armor --detach-sign --output foo-1.2.3.xz.pgp foo-1.2.3.xz

Then I document that users should verify downloads with my key
(after obtaining it from a reputable keyserver):

    gpg --verify foo-1.2.3.xz.pgp foo-1.2.3.xz

I also dump sha512sum and md5sum lists of all the release tarballs
to a checksum file and sign that in the same way, for completeness.
Of course this doesn't stop a new user from being hoodwinked if an
attacker compromises my Web server and replaces all the signatures
with their own (updating the README to match their key ID), but
anyone who knew they already had my key in their keyring should
hopefully spot the name on the signature when checking a new
download (porters and distro packagers in particular).
-- 
{ PGP( 48F9961143495829 ); FINGER( fungi@...ulhu.yuggoth.org );
WWW( http://fungi.yuggoth.org/ ); IRC( fungi@....yuggoth.org#ccl );
WHOIS( STANL3-ARIN ); MUD( kinrui@...arsis.mudpy.org:6669 ); }

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