On Feb 20, 2011, at 4:12 PM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 13:11, Jeff Johnson n3npq@mac.com wrote:
- experienced sysadmin diagnoses issue to the rpm level
Whoa: leave rpm out of this risk analysis please. Its not rpm, but rather yum, that routinely disables signature checking.
s/yum/people using yum/
if you don't mind :).
I don't mind at all because I'm not tied to an EKG in an ICU using RHEL with yum.
But I can show you the line of code -- that can only be changed by developers, not "people" in the usual sense of the word -- hardwired in yum code.
OTOH, there's many threat/security models, and noone really knows which model SHOULD apply to *.rpm. Lord knows that RPM is the only major software installer in the world where applications like yum routinely choose to disable signature/digest checking for performance and the rather useless Do you "trust" this pubkey(yN)? EULA-like dialog that reassures users but is only as secure as well as "trust" is defined. Smells like a BackOrifice to me and heck its spelled P-U-B-L-I-C K-E-Y
(We now return you to the previous thread of CentOS bashing, sorry for the interruption).
73 de jeff