On Aug 6, 2013, at 2:31 AM, Noah Kantrowitz <n...@coderanger.net> wrote:

> 
> On Aug 5, 2013, at 11:11 PM, Christian Theune <c...@gocept.com> wrote:
> 
>> Two more things:
>> 
>> why is the CDN not suffering from the security problems you describe for the 
>> mirrors?
>> 
>> a) Fastly seems to be the one owning the certificate for pypi.python.org. 
>> What?!?
> 
> They have a delegated SAN for it, which digicert (the CA) authorizes with the 
> domain contact (the board in this case).
> 
>> b) What does stop Fastly from introducing incorrect/rogue code in package 
>> downloads?
> 
> Basically this one boils down to personal trust from me to the Fastly team 
> combined with the other companies using them being very reputable. At the end 
> of the day, there is not currently any cryptographic mechanism preventing 
> Fastly from doing bad things.

To further expand on this answer, you need to trust *someone*. If we cut out 
Fastly here you could say, well what prevents Dyn Inc (DNS host) from simply 
redirecting the DNS to a different host? What prevents OSUOL from simply 
accessing the machines stored there and doing bad things (™). Hell, how many 
people here know the entire infrastructure team and has personally decided to 
trust them?

At the end of the day you need to pick and choose who you trust. Right now 
we're working on narrowing down the number of people trusted. The Python 
Infrastructure has decided it is willing to extend trust to Fastly to cover 
PyPI the same as it was willing to extend trust to Dyn, and OSOUL, and even the 
members of the Infra team.

Now that being said narrowing the list of people you need to trust is an 
ongoing goal, and one that isn't going to stop with limiting the number of 
places able to publish at varying python.org domain names who don't need to be. 
We're not in a particularly well off position yet but we are getting better all 
the time.

> 
> --Noah
> 
> _______________________________________________
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Donald Stufft
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