On Fri, Jul 15, 2005 at 10:41:22AM +1200, Philip Charles wrote: >On Thu, 14 Jul 2005, Steve McIntyre wrote: > >> Yes, this is a thorny area. I'm a little concerned - if we've gone to >> all the effort of adding signatures to the main archive, then it does >> seem to be ducking the problem to just trust all CDs. Allowing CDDs >> and redistributors to add new signatures as well should boost the >> security of the whole chain to the end user, too. >> >> Maybe I'm being paranoid, but it wouldn't be too hard to get a lot of >> users to to blindly install bad packages (e.g. from a trojanned cover >> disc). > >There was a similar argument some years back. On one side there was >customizable CDs, the other a rock solid security chain. What emerged >from the discussion was that a suprising number of people produced their >own disc sets for a variety of reasons. So customisable disc sets won >out. I would imagine that this would still be the situation today. People were a little less worried about security then, and the normal Debian base system did not support the security stuff we now have. I'd be curious to see if the balance of opinion has shifted the other way by now. -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com "Because heaters aren't purple!" -- Catherine Pitt
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