[Python-Dev] Hashes on same site as download? (original) (raw)

Dan Stromberg drsalists at gmail.com
Tue Oct 22 05:25:38 CEST 2013

On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 6:47 PM, Tim Delaney <timothy.c.delaney at gmail.com>wrote:

On 22 October 2013 12:21, Dan Stromberg <drsalists at gmail.com> wrote:

I may be missing something, but it seems the Python tarballs and hashes are on the same host, and this is not an entirely good thing for security. I was missing the gpg signing. That's probably more effective than md5 anyway - at least, I hope we're not using gpg with md5 :)

Looking at the download pages in rapid-skim-mode, I saw the hashes and ignored the text describing the use of gpg. FWIW, I'm guessing a lot of people do that.

The way things are now, an attacker breaks into one host, doctors up a

tarball, changes the hashes in the same host, and people download without noticing, even if they verify hashes.

If you put the hashes on a different host from the tarballs, the attacker has to break into two machines. In this scenario, the hashes add more strength. I'm not a security expert, but I can't see how that gives any more security than the current system (I tried to find whatever article you're talking about, but failed). It doesn't matter if you provide downloads in one place and direct people to get the hashes from elsewhere. An attacker has no need to compromise the server where the hashes are stored - they only need to compromise the server that tells you where to get the downloads and hashes.

I don't see the original article anymore, but I believe it was in a Crypto-gram newsletter several years ago.

The closest thing I found tonight was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5#Applications -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20131021/8524deae/attachment-0001.html>

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