What's the best way for open source projects to make it easy for their customers to get verified downloads? A lot of packages post MD5 checksums but no one tests them when downloading manually, do they? Automated signature checking on Debian packages seem to work better in practice; homebrew also verifies download checksums automatically.
Idea: protocol- and package-format-independent verification of packages, with trust rooted in DNSSEC of the ultimate source domain using DANE.
1. Have to control the signature that's provided 2. Have to have a trust system in place so that people realized that the signature provided wasn't legit.
I'm not sure the personal public key infrastructure (web of trust) is developed enough to absorb that.
These distros are distributed with a keychain that contains keys for all the approved developers/uploaders. What you have to trust is the fact that the keychain you have is the real one, but that is easy to do. Once you trust your keychain you can install things securely: the private pairs are in hands of people that have been through processes similar to this http://www.debian.org/devel/join/newmaint .
It's sort of a chicken and the egg problem, PGP. A better web of trust would help resolve these issues (I'm probably not that many trusted steps from a Debian developer), but without a better web of trust, it's hard to build a web of trust, if that makes any sense.
And it seems no one does key signing parties any more...
git has pretty good signatures for tags. Maybe there's a way to leverage that for secure open source distribution.