Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

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Or, more generally: sign gems with a PGP public key (not a signing certificate); and then, while generating a Gemfile.lock, also store the key fingerprints for each gem in a "Gemfile.keys" or somesuch. Thereafter, disallow re-bundling if Gemfile.keys exists and any of the fingerprints don't match the new ones (and make sure to ping the keyserver to check key revocation, too.) When bundling fails, head out to Google to see if something happened (in other words, pay manual attention), and then, if it was just a revocation and they switched to a new key because of a breach or something, delete your Gemfile.keys and let it get regenerated.

But really now: why is everyone so intent on centralized CA-based signing, when you don't even know 99% of the time who made the thing in the first place, but only care that it's the same person who made the ones before it?

One interesting thing I've learned about most rubygems keys is they don't have chains back to CAs - they tend to be self-signed, and the docs encourage this. In fact, AFAICT there aren't any default trusted CAs for rubygems (unlike, say, the list your browser or OS has) - every signer has to be trusted manually with `gem cert --add`. So you end up with a PGP-like trust model on top of X.509 certs.

I don't know exactly what this rationale was behind this model - I plan to explore this further in subsequent posts. I'm a relative neophyte to code signing - part of the reason I'm writing these posts is to teach myself how things work.

Basically because a proper X.509 implementation requires a CA to be in place first, so you have a place to submit a CSR, but there is no CA, so you're forced to self sign. I've written a rant on the topic here:

http://www.rubygems-openpgp-ca.org/blog/gem-signing-x509-and...

I've been trying to get people to sign with OpenPGP because that can be done first and then you can put an authentication system into place after the fact. You can't do this with X.509, if/when a CA comes into play all gems would need to be resigned and republished.

The next release of rubygems-openpgp, due out in a week or two, will do everything you want:

https://github.com/grant-olson/rubygems-openpgp/issues/15

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