Secrecy and user trust

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Wed, 03 Sep 2008 10:30:39 -0400
davidsen at tmr.com (Bill Davidsen) wrote:

> Anders Karlsson wrote:
> > * Travis Arnold <vestwearingpunk at gmail.com> [20080902 22:52]:
> > [drivel snipped]
> >> Hey I am currently downloading the ISO dvd to install after I
> >> finish my day's lessons, is this not a good idea to do?
> > 
> > The word from the Fedora folks on Aug 14th was - don't update until
> > further notice. Since then, they have - IIRC - said it's safe to do
> > so. The ISO's should be safe, as well as the packages that you can
> > update to from the servers.
> > 
> > New updates should start rolling once they have resigned everything.
> > 
> Distributing that will be quite slow, since they need to (a)
> validate, then (b) sign, then (c) distribute out-of-band to mirrors,

Well, depends on what you mean by quite slow, but yes, doing all the
re-signing is taking a while right now. Distribution to mirrors will be
the next bottleneck. 

> and then hardest of all find a secure way to provide the public part
> of the signing key. Obviously you don't risk letting someone slip in
> a bogus NEW fake key and go around on this again.

Indeed. 

The proposed plan (that has since had a few modifications): 
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/rel-eng/2008-August/001627.html

> Suggestion: since the livna key is still secure (AFAIK) let them 
> distribute the new Fedora key and sign the RPM.

That was suggested before, but it's not a great solution for several
reasons: Not everyone has livna enabled. Having one repo publish keys
for another seems wrong, especially when they are not officially
connected. 

kevin
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