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Re: Checksums on ftp



On Thu, Apr 27, 2000 at 10:58:54AM +0200, L. Besselink wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, 26 Apr 2000, Ethan Benson wrote:
> 
> > 
> > so why don't we use sha1 or rmd160 or all three like OpenBSD ;-)
> > 
> > lets see you break those ;-)
> > 
> > -- 
> > Ethan Benson
> > http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
> > 
> 
> I think the system OpenBSD uses is great, I think we should combine:
> dpkg, apt and aide (the just added to unstable intruder detection system,
> includes checking on conf and binaries).
> 
> The system would work like this:
> apt-get install package
> check md5 and others inculded in the file or in seperate files that where
> on the ftp/http site.
> check if aide is installed, if so:
> 	check if the files that needs to be installed are in the
> directories that need to be checked by aide, if so make md5 and
> others. Then install the file.
> (and ofcourse make medium on which database exists readonly again, by
> hardware).

this last one is tricky, the databases are probably too large for
floppies, and floppies tend to go bad rather fast if you use them
alot.  hard disks sometimes have a read-only jumper but you would have
to reboot and open the case every time you wanted to apt-get
install/dist-upgrade something.  one neat way would be a CD-RW, have
both an ordinary CDROM and a CD-RW drive, when you upgrade or install
something move the checksums cd-rw to the RW drive, update it then
take it out and put it back in the CDROM drive.  theres no modifying a
CD-r[w] from a CDROM drive.  this system would break down on remotely
administered systems however.

OpenBSD (and probably the other BSDs too) also have kernel
securlevels that can be useful in protecting this kind of stuff, once
you raise the securelevel to 1 on OpenBSD (as is done by default at
boot) the superuser may not remove the system immutable bit from any
file, and device files corrasponding to mounted filesystems may no be
accessed (or maybe just written..).  securelevel 2 gets more draconian
where no device files at all may be written (and possibly read)
firewall rules may not be rewritten and a few other things i don't
remember.  the immutablity is nice but you have to reboot into single
user mode to remove the immutability and update the immutable file,
which is rather inconvenient...

this contrasts with linux's immutable bit that the superuser may
remove whenever he wants, making it mostly pointless.  (i read
somewhere that someone added a securelevel to linux, but i dont recall
details) 

> And no I can't code. :(
> 	Leen.

me neither, at least not in C ;-)

-- 
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/

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