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> My approach should be doable with a mere ~10 lines patch If you actually believe this can be accomplished in 10 lines of code you are not qualified to be giv

> My approach should be doable with a mere ~10 lines patch If you actually believe this can be accomplished in 10 lines of code you are not qualified to be giving security advice.

moe 14y ago
It's always sad to have people chime in like that. The changes I specified are, indeed, about a 10 line patch. You change the default for '-P' (1 line) and you inspect pushes to rubygems.org for a signature and reject them if they lack one. I'd be very surprised if the latter exceeds 9 lines. All you have to do is look for s.cert_chain in the gemspec, so it would actually likely be closer to 3 lines. You may disagree with what I proposed and demand additional changes, or you may prefer the superior (albeit more complex) PGP approach. But you should not go ad hominem over a basic fact when you obviously have no idea what you're talking about. (disclaimer: one of us two has actually read the code involved with gem signing just a few days ago - and I'm pretty sure it wasn't you...)
- technomancy 14y ago
  I'm not disputing that this change is a step in the right direction, but the implication that it solves roughly the same problem as the existing OpenPGP-based infrastructure is very misleading. [Edit: if you din't mean to imply this by your post then I apologize; it was not clear from how I read it.] Same with the idea that you can "just apply a 10-line patch" without considering the background in documentation, tooling, and educating the community that such a change would require--it implies that the current rubygems maintainers are ignorant or lazy for not having done this easy fix already. (I spoke at length on a PGP-based approach to this same problem at the 2012 Clojure Conj conference if you would like to talk about credentials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBSUIKMdQ4w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBSUIKMdQ4w)
  - moe 14y ago
    I didn't claim it solves "roughly the same problem", only a very relevant subset of the problem (integrity) closely related to the unfortunate situation rubygems is in right now. What you call background (docs, tooling, education) is an argument in favor of the simple approach, which is already implemented and just not enforced - in contrast to whipping up new infrastructure of significantly higher complexity from scratch. Also I didn't imply the maintainers are ignorant or lazy, they were merely oblivious. So I'll repeat: The PGP approach is obviously superior, but comes with serious complexity and implementation concerns (there is no native PGP-library in ruby). Consequently it might make sense to add basic security right now, in a minimally intrusive fashion, while a more complete solution is developed. This, by the way, is part of the discussion that the rubygems team is having right now[1]. [1] https://github.com/rubygems-trust/rubygems.org/wiki/Overview https://github.com/rubygems-trust/rubygems.org/wiki/Overview

> My approach should be doable with a mere ~10 lines patch If you actually believe this can be accomplished in 10 lines of code you are not qualified to be giving security advice.

moe 14y ago

It's always sad to have people chime in like that. The changes I specified are, indeed, about a 10 line patch. You change the default for '-P' (1 line) and you inspect pushes to rubygems.org for a signature and reject them if they lack one. I'd be very surprised if the latter exceeds 9 lines. All you have to do is look for s.cert_chain in the gemspec, so it would actually likely be closer to 3 lines. You may disagree with what I proposed and demand additional changes, or you may prefer the superior (albeit more complex) PGP approach. But you should not go ad hominem over a basic fact when you obviously have no idea what you're talking about. (disclaimer: one of us two has actually read the code involved with gem signing just a few days ago - and I'm pretty sure it wasn't you...)

technomancy 14y ago
I'm not disputing that this change is a step in the right direction, but the implication that it solves roughly the same problem as the existing OpenPGP-based infrastructure is very misleading. [Edit: if you din't mean to imply this by your post then I apologize; it was not clear from how I read it.] Same with the idea that you can "just apply a 10-line patch" without considering the background in documentation, tooling, and educating the community that such a change would require--it implies that the current rubygems maintainers are ignorant or lazy for not having done this easy fix already. (I spoke at length on a PGP-based approach to this same problem at the 2012 Clojure Conj conference if you would like to talk about credentials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBSUIKMdQ4w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBSUIKMdQ4w)
- moe 14y ago
  I didn't claim it solves "roughly the same problem", only a very relevant subset of the problem (integrity) closely related to the unfortunate situation rubygems is in right now. What you call background (docs, tooling, education) is an argument in favor of the simple approach, which is already implemented and just not enforced - in contrast to whipping up new infrastructure of significantly higher complexity from scratch. Also I didn't imply the maintainers are ignorant or lazy, they were merely oblivious. So I'll repeat: The PGP approach is obviously superior, but comes with serious complexity and implementation concerns (there is no native PGP-library in ruby). Consequently it might make sense to add basic security right now, in a minimally intrusive fashion, while a more complete solution is developed. This, by the way, is part of the discussion that the rubygems team is having right now[1]. [1] https://github.com/rubygems-trust/rubygems.org/wiki/Overview https://github.com/rubygems-trust/rubygems.org/wiki/Overview