Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Patrick Lauer <patrick@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Overlays and Metadata Cache
Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2009 08:43:30
Message-Id: 200906211043.27342.patrick@gentoo.org
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Overlays and Metadata Cache by Ciaran McCreesh
1 On Saturday 20 June 2009 21:00:46 Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
2 > On Sat, 20 Jun 2009 20:40:17 +0200
3 >
4 > Patrick Lauer <patrick@g.o> wrote:
5 > > > Have you thought about the security implications of this?
6 > >
7 > > Yes.
8 > >
9 > > > How much do you trust the people running the overlays listed in
10 > > > layman?
11 > >
12 > > VirtualBox.
13 >
14 > And how do you use VirtualBox to prevent one malicious person from
15 > running arbitrary code on the system of anyone using any layman overlay?
16
17 Ah. I thought you were referring to the issues involved in sourcing ebuilds.
18
19 But as you shift the discussion now ... well ... right now we allow almost
20 everyone to add an overlay to the layman config. So we trust overlay
21 maintainers not to screw users.
22
23 The metadata cache is "inert" in the sense that it isn't executable code (and
24 if anyone tries to execute it ... "You're doing it wrong" comes to mind"), so
25 adding it does not pessimize the situation.
26
27 So how do we guarantee that overlay maintainers (many who aren't even devs and
28 thus might not be subjectively held to the same standards) don't screw users?
29
30 Hmm. I can't think of any sane way to prevent people from writing bad ebuilds.
31 And I also can't think of a reliable method to detect such or prevent users
32 from trying to use them. In short, we just have to trust people.
33 As a sidenote, we just randomly trust devs too. And it usually works ...

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Overlays and Metadata Cache Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@××××××××××.com>