On Fri, 22 Jul 2005, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:

> If the hash is only being used to identify changed files for
> pkg_delete, MD5 is fine.  For security, you're quite right.

Ah, I'd not realized the purpose of it.

> Two issues occur to me.  First, what if there are extra files in the
> archive?  The contents list has to be defined to be complete.  Second,
> what about duplicate entries in the archive and contents file?  The
> semantics of that need to be defined and enforced.

It doesn't seem hard to produce a warning or an error if there are any
files in the archive not listed in the signature document, outside of
the signature document itself.

Duplicate entries?

If there are two files with the same name in the archive, the later
would be extracted over the earlier, anyway. Either they are the same
file, then, in which case we check twice and both pass, or they are
different, in which case one will fail the check, which can be treated
as any other failure.

And in the inverse situation, with two entries in the signed file list,
either they will have the same hash, in which case it's irrelevant, or
they will have different hashes (for the same hash scheme), in which
case one will fail.

Assuming one defines the check algorithm to check every hash in the
list, and produce an error if there are any files that were not checked,
what are the weaknesses in this scheme versus just signing the entire
archive as a whole, I wonder?

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974   http://www.NetBSD.org
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