Subject: bug#19479: Package manager vulnerable

From: Kelly Dean <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 06:38:12 +0000

Richard Stallman wrote:
> What do we need to do on ftp.gnu.org to avoid these dangers?

It depends on what you expect the user's responsibility to be.

If you expect him to know the latest version number of a package (without relying on the gnu.org webserver to find out, in case it's compromised), and you expect him to manually verify that his download is the latest version (in addition to verifying the signature, of course), and you give him the ability to do this by always including both the name and the version number in your packages (so far as I'm aware, you already do) and never re-using version numbers (I think you're ok here too), then you have no problem, so there's nothing you need to do.

Otherwise, the problems and solution are the same as for package distribution systems in general, as detailed at
https://www.cs.arizona.edu/stork/packagemanagersecurity/attacks-on-package-managers.html
https://www.cs.arizona.edu/stork/packagemanagersecurity/otherattacks.html