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Attacks against GPG signed APT repositories

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Re: Attacks against GPG signed APT repositories

#3
--force-yes is bad, but for reasons that have nothing to do with replay attacks.

This option effectively disables package authentication. This is because it forces "yes" answer to all questions, including the question about installing unauthenticated packages.

Re: Attacks against GPG signed APT repositories

#5
post #2

This is such a frustrating clickbait headline! Most of the 'attack' s are: 1. Plain old bugs in apt. 2. Involve disabling the very security features (GPG and checksum verification) designed to prevent that attack!

Additionally the article appears to intentionally conflate "issues" such as "if you turn security off" or "if the repository isn't signed" to make their list of possible issues look bigger. None of these are "Attacks against GPG signed APT repositories".

Re: Attacks against GPG signed APT repositories

#7
post #5
post #2

This is such a frustrating clickbait headline! Most of the 'attack' s are: 1. Plain old bugs in apt. 2. Involve disabling the very security features (GPG and checksum verification) designed to prevent that attack!

Additionally the article appears to intentionally conflate "issues" such as "if you turn security off" or "if the repository isn't signed" to make their list of possible issues look bigger. None of these are "Attacks against GPG signed APT repositories".

What about replay attack? Providing apt with old metadata and packages?

Re: Attacks against GPG signed APT repositories

#8
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additionally the article appears to intentionally conflate "issues" such as "if you turn security off" or "if the repository isn't signed" to make their list of possible issues look bigger. None of these are "Attacks against GPG signed APT repositories".

What about replay attack? Providing apt with old metadata and packages?

The release files have 'Valid-Until' fields, which will cause apt to reject it on replay.

Re: Attacks against GPG signed APT repositories

#9
post #4

For a moment I thought there's a new research paper about attacks on APT. Nope. The paper the article links to is from 2008.

Yep, and the information is still relevant! The article explains how it applies to recent versions of APT in the current Ubuntu LTS releases.
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