On Wed, Sep 03, 2025 at 09:35:12PM +0200, Philipp Kern wrote: > Hey :) > > On 9/2/25 1:55 PM, Guillem Jover wrote: > > To be very honest, I've seen the reproducible and key rotation problems > > to be such a concern that I don't think we'd want to have those in the > > archive. I think embedded signatures do make sense if your primary way > > to transport .debs is off-repos and/or you also want to track provenance, > > have a small set of binaries, or are prepared to rebuild everything to > > be able to re-sign (even on a stable release), otherwise for something > > like Debian the current repo-signing has always felt superior in all > > possible ways. > > I think there is a certain appeal if we could trust the archive only for > versioning (i.e. the set of packages in a suite) and not for content. But > that would be very far from where we are and key rotation would need to be > built into the system. At which point it should probably be some sort of > detached signature, not an embedded one. > > > And IMA has indeed the same exact problem, where I'm also not convinced > > at all about them for the Debian archive. Yet, I still think it would > > be nice to have a format that might make it possible to explore that, > > because perhaps for some organizations or distribution methods it does > > make sense. (Because decoupling the IMA signatures from the general > > filesystem metadata payload means injecting or changing them is going > > to be way easier.) > > Yeah that's fair. Having a format where you can just append some signatures > on the fly might make sense here. But then maybe they would need to be > authenticated differently than the repo root of trust.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "append on the fly", but the current file format that debsigs creates and modifies (and debsig-verify checks) keeps the signatures in a separate ar member of the deb file. This allows, even now, and most probably in Guillem's revamp too, adding a new signature without removing all the existing ones, and without modifying the actual content of the deb file's "control" and "data" members. So if I'm following the discussion, in theory even the current format would allow adding a signature with a new key, although, of course, that would modify the MD5/SHA256/whatever checksums of the deb file itself, so Apt may then throw a hissy fit (and it would be right to). G'luck, Peter -- Peter Pentchev r...@ringlet.net r...@debian.org pe...@morpheusly.com PGP key: https://www.ringlet.net/roam/roam.key.asc Key fingerprint 2EE7 A7A5 17FC 124C F115 C354 651E EFB0 2527 DF13
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