Re: Why are in-person meetings required for the debian keyring?
Russ Allbery writes ("Re: Why are in-person meetings required for the debian keyring?"):
> I think the point is that so could the person who showed up at DebConf.
> Once you start postulating a sufficiently motivated attacker that they
> would be willing to take the time to establish a contribution track record
> and go through the NM process, showing up at DebConf with a forged ID is
> not increasing the difficulty of the attack by very much, nor is it
> increasing the risk by all that much.
There are organisations with plenty of money, who would perhaps like
to infiltrate us, but for whom risk of exposure is the biggest cost of
trying.
Establishing a track record of contributions from an email alias and
some computers is very easy for them. Indeeed already they do it
quite a lot, both overtly and covertly - cf what looks to some like
derailment (ie sabotage) of certain IETF WGs.
Sending a warm body to turn up at a conference is much riskier. Even
if the person just turns up at the KSP, and engages in no small talk
with anyone, their photo might be taken; they might be `made' by
suspicious attendees; their (no doubt offically issued) alias
documents might be scrutinised and recorded; and so on.
These are perhaps small risks, but a small risk of headlines like
`spooks found covertly infiltrating Free Software project' is a big
cost to those kind of people.
Ian.
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