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On Mon, Jul 2, 2018 at 2:23 PM Alec Warner <antarus@g.o> wrote: |
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> |
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> We might reduce the complexity here by saying things like: |
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> |
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> "We have N trust levels" |
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> |
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I snipped most of your text because I didn't really see a natural way |
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to include only some of it, though this really pertains to most of it, |
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and I didn't want to quote the whole thing. |
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I think that getting to a point where you can trust dev A and not |
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trust dev B is probably something that should be viewed as a future |
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goal, because the reality is that there are few devs you aren't |
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depending on in some way. |
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I do think that moving from trusting infra to trusting all the devs is |
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an improvement though. |
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Today you have to trust infra, and infra trusts all the devs, so |
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you're implicitly trusting them anyway. That means that you can't |
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distribute the tree without going through infra, and it means that |
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infra keys are a weak point, and those keys are necessarily accessible |
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by automated processes on machines that are network-reachable. Sure, |
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they could be in HSMs/etc, but those HSMs still will sign whatever |
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they're given by the automated process because there is no human in |
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the loop. |
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If you just go straight to verifying dev keys then infra is less of a |
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bottleneck (it opens new distribution options without compromising |
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security), and now all the keys are potentially in hardware modules |
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that don't have to just blindly sign whatever they're given, and which |
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are not online most of the time. That isn't perfect because a rooted |
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box could probably still MITM the module, but it is an improvement. |
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-- |
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Rich |
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