I had no idea this issue had been identified. While I find this tool very useful, the project is seeming rather questionable to me now.
I had no idea this issue had been identified. While I find this tool very useful, the project is seeming rather questionable to me now.
I too wish the developer would respond, but I don’t think this is the catastrophe people are making it out to be. One comment seems to explain why these binaries are included:
that’s only a few files out of the 153
It sounds to me as a documentation issue, as the next comment says, simply including a
wgetscript should solve this.On the contrary: that just goes to show what a fucking catastrophe for software freedom “Secure[sic] Boot” is.
If the hashes match the files from the Fedora or OpenSUSE releases, then does this really matter?
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that’s what automation is for - nobody is going to manually check them, but anyone is able to automatically set something up to check their hashes in change… the fact that it’s possible that anyone is doing that now that it’s a known issue perhaps makes it less problematic as an attack vector
That is true, but also nobody is doing it. Just like nobody is verifying Signal’s “reproducible builds”.
are you sure?
there could be thousands just waiting for a failure to come out and say “HEY THIS IS DODGY”
Is that any different from no one checking the code every update?
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That’s ok if we are talking about malware publicly shown in the published source code… but there’s also the possibility of a private source-code patch with malware that it’s secretly being applied when building the binaries for distribution.
This is why it’s important for builds to be reproducible, any third party should be able to build their own binary from clean source code and be able to obtain the exact same binary with the same hash. If the hashes match, then you have a proof of the binary being clean.
The problem is not near enough projects support reproducible builds, and many that do aren’t being regularly verified, at least publicly.
While this is true, it only requires the shim and grub to be copied for another distro.
From other comments there are a lot more blobs than just these two.
It sounds like most, if not all, come from upstream projects.
Would be nice if the dev can respond and confirm that…
I think they did say that in the older thread. But for proper security, you shouldn’t have to trust them. You should have build tools that will re-fetch everything to create an identical build. That gives a clear chain of custody, which proves that morning has been tampered with.