Re: [gentoo-security] Securing portage --- an OpenBSD approach

[Paul de Vrieze]

On Friday 12 November 2004 13:54, dante@×××××××××××××××.net wrote:
> The recent discussion on how to protect the portage tree from
> man-in-the-middle attacks has concentrated on signing either the
> portage tarball or the individual files in the tree.
>
> What about approaching the problem the way OpenBSD deals with its
> ports, that is with cvs over an ssh tunnel to authorized mirrors.  The
> only drawback I see is that many gentoo users use rsync, but the cvs
> approach could be added on top of what already exists and security
> conscious users will then have the option of switching.

In the early days, gentoo did actually offer anonymous cvs. It was quickly 
removed as putting a too big load on the servers. I don't know whether we 
can devise a way in which we can offer an acceptable level of anon cvs. 
In between I do think that we might want to set up secure rsync (ssh or 
stunnel) at least from the master rsync mirror to the normal mirrors, and 
maybe even allow normal users to use "secure rsync". Setting up ssl rsync 
should not be hard, allthough rsync does not by itself support it out of 
the box. Stunnel should be able to offer it.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@g.o
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net