On Fri, 2020-03-13 at 07:07 -0400, Neal Gompa wrote:
On Fri, Mar 13, 2020 at 7:02 AM Bastien Nocera
<bnocera(a)redhat.com>
wrote:
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> >
> > On 3/12/20 10:57 AM, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > >
> > > ----- Original Message -----
> > > <snip>
> > > > The git tags are still signed by Linus. Does that cover your
> > > > concerns?
> > >
> > > Not really, no. I think that multiplying the intermediaries
> > > between
> > >
kernel.org
> > > and the Fedora repos by adding
gitlab.com in the middle might
> > > not be the
> > > best of ideas.
> > >
> > > If the Fedora security team is fine with it, I'm fine with it,
> > > and even if
> > > I
> > > understand the practical concerns (pagure not being up to par
> > > to deal with
> > > repos that size, and without a mail gateway support), I find it
> > > slightly
> > > concerning.
> > >
> >
> > I think this boils down to how much do you trust the kernel
> > maintainers.
> > Keep in mind that the existing model requires the kernel
> > maintainers
> > to manually pull down a tree and extract the tarball and then
> > upload.
> > You can probably trust them to not do anything malicious but
> > mistakes
> > can happen (source: I screwed up many times). It's good to be
> > concerned
> > about provenance as a threat model but I consider maintainers
> > screwing
> > up manual tasks to be a bigger threat model to Fedora kernel
> > security
> > so anything that moves towards automation is a benefit in my
> > eyes.
>
> For me, it's about how much we trust
gitlab.com _in addition_ to
> trusting
>
kernel.org and
fedoraproject.org. I wouldn't be concerned at all if
> the new "in-between" tree was at either of those 2 locations.
For what it's worth, while I agree, I doubt the kernel maintainers
will care about that. They clearly haven't cared given that the CKI
project does not run on what most in the project generally considers
"trusted infrastructure".
I'm not sure what your issue with CKI is, but that's beside the point.
What exactly about the tarball coming from
kernel.org makes you trust
it? That's not a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely curious. Is it the
x509 certificate they were issued? Is it that the tarballs are GPG-
signed?
I also am personally not a fan of the "source-git" approach
for
various reasons (including that it makes it *much* more difficult to
identify downstream vs upstream changes, more easily leading to
forks), but the kernel team actively contributes to upstream and our
current policy makes it incredibly difficult to have non-upstream
changes in the kernel, so I'm less worried there.
Currently we make a clone of Linus's tree and do a diff between master
and the latest tag and then plop that into the lookaside cache. No
individual commits, nothing. You know what happens if I'm working on a
patch in that repository? Into the patch it goes, and good luck finding
it among thousands of other changes.
In the source tree, every commit is still broken out, figuring out what
patches Fedora carries is a simple git command. It's *way* simpler to
discover what patches are included in a build and why.
Kind regards,
Jeremy