Sponsored link
Vyatta –
Linux & Open Source
Alternative to Cisco –
Advanced Routing,
Firewall, VPN, QoS..
Free Download ->
| |||||||||||
security of distributing buildssecurity of distributing buildsPosted Mar 6, 2008 6:07 UTC (Thu) by pjm (subscriber, #2080)Parent article: Proposal: Fedora@Home
There are some obvious security issues with trusting the build results of random users. The problem with building is that it takes about as long to check that the result is correct as it does to do the work yourself. The only workable scheme that springs to mind is to limit the users to those who can already subvert the binaries by other means, which is (by design) quite a small number of people. (Note that subverting a binary is harder to detect than subverting source code, so should ideally exclude people whose only other means of subverting binaries is by subverting source code.) You can't use a trust criterion of "the person has always given correct builds in the past when we've checked the results", because it's still worthwhile for a black-hat to send N corrects builds followed by 1 incorrect build, and one incorrect build of one object file (indeed function) is all that's necessary. A criterion of "N people give the same result" is problematic because of (a) need N large enough to reduce risk of collusion, whereas (b) it requires N-fold duplication of work (see also the objection about increased environmental cost of using extra CPU cycles).
(Log in to post comments)
Security of distributing builds Posted Mar 6, 2008 12:07 UTC (Thu) by midg3t (subscriber, #30998) [Link] No-one would seriously entertain the idea of allowing untrusted builds into the official software archive. There are many cases when the potential for bad data to be returned is not much of a problem. For instance the grid could be used as an unofficial build farm with on-commit autobuilds. If there's a strange build failure then the first step would be to reproduce that failure in a similar environment. The release builds would still be done on more secure (controlled) machines. Similarly for scientific applications the aim might be to look for outliers - eg. how SETI works - once again "interesting" results are always reprocessed in a controlled environment.
security of distributing builds Posted Mar 20, 2008 7:22 UTC (Thu) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link] > There are some obvious security issues with trusting the build results of random users. I, too, surmised from the name "Fedora@Home" that they are planning to offload some Fedora build work onto users -- but nowhere in the announcement is this actually proposed. Seems just to be a suboptimal project title...
security of distributing builds Posted Mar 24, 2008 10:13 UTC (Mon) by pjm (subscriber, #2080) [Link] I'm not sure what “announcement” robbe means, but the fourth paragraph of the parent article mentions “Fedora users … contributing CPU cycles towards things like builds…”; this is what I was replying to.
|
|||||||||||