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Re: Pre-approval for apt 0.7.21: "Valid-Until" feature and proxy changes



(dropping debian-release@ from CC)

Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Eugene V. Lyubimkin:
> 
>> Florian Weimer wrote:
>>> And if Valid-Until is only checked against the real-time clock, the
>>> attacker can still feed bad data over NTP, so it's not even a complete
>>> defense. 8-(
>> However, it seems there is no better solution, or is there?
> 
> A counter in the style of a Lamport clock should work, or checking
> that the Valid-Until header does not recede in time.
It seems that Lamport clock is primarily designed for distributed system and
always-in-work processes, which is not the APT's case, unless we create a unstoppable APT
daemon.

Second approach... well, the bad guy can start/stop clock for every APT run, with some
small seed, e.g. 1 minute or similar. So, delaying the time is possible for quite a long
time after Valid-Until value.

Generally, I assume that delaying the clock for at least 1 day would leave very suspicious
info in logs, websebver timestamps i.e., and such a case would be easily captured by
(good?) system administrator. Also I assume that security team prefers having checking
against the real-time clock than having no mechanism at all. Am I wrong?

-- 
Eugene V. Lyubimkin aka JackYF, JID: jackyf.devel(maildog)gmail.com
Ukrainian C++ developer, Debian Maintainer, APT contributor

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