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Re: is melpa just unsigned?


From: Platon Pronko
Subject: Re: is melpa just unsigned?
Date: Tue, 23 May 2023 10:17:43 +0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/102.11.0

On 2023-05-23 09:53, Samuel Wales wrote:
just brainstorming but if by chance melpa is not signed, i wonder if
there are package managers that kind of kludge security a bit.  not
perfection, but try to dtrt.  enhancing melpa or bypassing it.

for example, idk the current status of git's sha-1 [?] crypto
brokenness, but packages that use git could perhaps have their shas
compared via multiple routes, or so.  maybe only google-level actors
could currently break sha-1 for all i know.

at least you could check that the sha you have is the same lots of
other users have?

are guix or nix debian-like in their signing infrastructure?  i am
just thinking out loud here for possible solutions for more security.
comparing multiple routes, using git's history, or a  clever trick i
am not thinking of now.  does el-get do?

of course i am aware signing is only part of ensuring security,
and melpa does curating, and authors or computers could turn evil, but
where there is a chain that reliably goes back to an author from the
code you dled, it's a pretty good feeling.

The whole point of MELPA is to automatically provide up-to date packages built 
directly from upstream repos - the default MELPA repository builds a new 
release on each new commit (alternatively there's MELPA Stable, which creates 
new relases from new tags).

The key idea here is "automatically". So I don't see any way for these packages 
to be signed, since the package authors obviously won't be giving their keys to MELPA.

I suppose if you are looking for signed packages your best bet is GNU ELPA - 
some of the packages there are indeed signed.

P.S. As far as I know Emacs mailing lists prefer bottom-posting (as opposed to 
top-posting).

--
Best regards,
Platon Pronko
PGP 2A62D77A7A2CB94E




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