Description of problem: yum connects to https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org to fetch the metalink file and trusts all certificate authorities installed on the system by default when verifying the certificate of that server - no certificate pinning in place. Fedora relies on the https connection to deliver the metalink file to the client without being prone to MITM attacks. The past has shown that the CA ecosystem has severe security issues. Therefore it is recommended to reduce the number of trusted CAs for a given use-case whenever feasible. Yum provides an easy way to specify the specific CA that should be trusted when performing certificate verification. From yum.conf's man page: sslcacert Path to the directory containing the databases of the certificate authorities yum should use to verify SSL certificates. Defaults to none - uses system default Fedora does not make use of this option in its repo files: /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates-testing.repo doing so is rather easy: sslcacert=/path/to/issuing/ca.pem You could even ship your own CA - completely removing the third-party CA provider since you control the client and the server, but since not only fedora clients are connecting to this server it is probably better to not completely break other clients.. To not break all clients when certificates are replaced, this new configuration requires some coordination every time the certificate of mirrors.fedoraproject.org is renewed. "Will the issuing CA change for the next cert?" Apart from that I believe the effort to implement CA pinning for yum is rather low and it significantly reduces the likelihood of a successful SSL MITM attack with a certificate issued by a compromised CA. Additional info: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/users/2014-August/452703.html
I would recommend filing this against dnf as well since dnf is replacing yum in an upcoming release according to the current proposed plan
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