Bug 2225188

Summary:	Circular reasoning in source code verification
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Björn Persson <bjorn>
Component:	bitcoin-core	Assignee:	Simone Caronni <negativo17>
Status:	NEW ---	QA Contact:
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Version:	39	CC:	negativo17
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Description Björn Persson 2023-07-24 13:55:24 UTC

Description of problem:
Since the packaging changes made for bitcoin-core 25.0, a program extracted from the source tarball – verify.py – is used to verify the signatures on that same tarball. The thing that's supposed to be authenticated is allowed to assert that it is authentic. That's useless.

If an attacker crafts a malicious source tarball, they will include a malicious verify.py that pretends to verify the signatures and feigns success. Thus the verification step is neutered, and the build will continue as if the malicious tarball had been verified.

Version-Release number of selected component:
25.0-1.fc39

Comment 1 Simone Caronni 2023-08-11 09:02:55 UTC

This is the upstream method, with the difference that the official way is to download the binaries/tarballs/gpgkeys on the fly, which we are not allowed to do:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/contrib/verify-binaries/README.md

The last example of the readme file is exactly that.

I preferred the old method but I could not make it work.

Patches are welcome!

Comment 2 Fedora Release Engineering 2023-08-16 07:54:22 UTC

This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora Linux 39 development cycle.
Changing version to 39.