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Re: bits from the release team



Le Ven 5 Mai 2006 18:41, Florian Weimer a écrit :
> * Lionel Elie Mamane:
> > Why can't we have a master key that signs the yearly keys? After
> > all, we have a long-term unique X.509 master key, so what's the
> > difference with OpenPGP?
>
> End users are typically not exposed to the X.509 keys, which makes
> things a lot easier.
>
> By the way, if you've got a master key, you need to plan for key
> rollover, too.  Why not apply that procedure directly to the keys
> used to sign the release files?  A yearly key change just results in
> unnecessary administrative overhead for our users, without providing
> any real benefit to them.  A key compromise still needs manual
> intervention.
>
> At the very least, if we have to keep that yearly key change for
> political reasons, please schedule it in a way that it doesn't happen
> in January.

Proposal 1:

  a possible way would be to have two valid keys at any time. like one
  new key per year (or 6 month like you want) with a validity of 2 years
  (resp. one year).

  that would obviously mean two signatures per package (but I don't
  think that's that much work) and would require the user to update
  their "keyring package" only once every year (or 6 month), which looks
  like a quite reasonnable trade-off. Even stable updates can use that
  scheme, since it's released more than once a year.


Proposal 2:

  the package that holds the public signature key has to contain every
  single emited key, and be signed with any anterior one. Meaning that
  the upgrade for any user would be smooth.

  I don't think that having a kludge in dpkg that forces the upgrade of
  that package ASAP would be hard or dangerous to implement, so that
  even a non aware user could just "apt-get update" without having read
  the release notes.

  This is simpler, but less secure than the Proposal 1.


Proposal ...:

  there is a lot of such ideas IMHO, one just has to think 10 minutes to
  imagine a couple of ones.


IMHO, changing the key every year at any date is not problematic at all, 
because there is plenty of solution to do smooth replacement of the 
key.
-- 
·O·  Pierre Habouzit
··O                                                madcoder@debian.org
OOO                                                http://www.madism.org

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