On 1/31/23 11:20 AM, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:

On Tue, Jan 31, 2023 at 10:56:52AM -0500, Eli Schwartz wrote:

quoted

And for tarballs that are generated once and uploaded to ftp storage,
not repeatedly generated on the fly, we know the checksum will never
legitimately change, so we *want* to hash the compressed file.
Decompressing kernel.org tarballs in order to run PGP on them is *slow*.

FWIW, the most correct way is:

* download sha256sums.asc and verify its signature (auto-signed by infra)
* download the tarball you want and verify that the checksum matches
* uncompress and verify the PGP signature (signed by developer)

This script implements this workflow:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/mricon/korg-helpers.git/tree/get-verified-tarball

This is just what I said, but with an additional first step for when you
are updating to a new tarball and don't have your own checksums
integrated into your own ecosystem tracking.

In most contexts, it's utterly unacceptable to not remember the checksum
of the file you used last time and instead simply trust PGP identity
verification. This permits upstream the technical means to be malicious,
and re-upload a totally different tarball with the same name, different
contents, and different PGP signature, and you will never notice because
the PGP signature is still okay.

Just because I trust you all doesn't mean I should ignore existing best
practices to make sure that I always use the same reviewed
byte-identical tarball -- or find out exactly why it changed.


-- 
Eli Schwartz