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.
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.