Show HN: Oya – New projects set up lightning fast • Hacker News Board

Post by _uhtu » Tue, May 21, 2019, 1:27 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #19

_uhtu wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since it's HTTPS, a signature or checksum are pretty pointless, TLS will do the certificate checking and encryption for you. Your assertion that "if your server gets hacked, so do your customers", also applies to a checksum, as the hackers would just change the checksum listed on the website. If you have a problem with piping curl to bash, then you can just not do so, you can download the bash script, see what it doe…

Since it's HTTPS, a signature or checksum are pretty pointless, TLS will do the certificate checking and encryption for you. Serving the file over HTTPS is good because it means no one can do a man in the middle attack to change it, but it's not enough to be secure. If someone compromises the server itself the file could be altered at the source. The point of the checksum is to ensure that the file you're downloading…

If someone compromises the server itself there's basically no form of security from that point that would help. The attacker could just put anything on the downloads page, including a new checksum for the compromised download. Nothing is safe if the server falls into malicious hands, but TLS is much easier for both the user and the website host when compared to a checksum, so that's probably the best decision for this kind of system.

The only time where I'd recommend a checksum over TLS is when you're dealing with a very large download, like a Linux ISO or something. The TLS encryption would cause a noticeable slowdown, so in that case a checksum may provide the best user experience.