RHEL Engineering is moving the tracking of its product development work on RHEL 6 through RHEL 9 to Red Hat Jira (issues.redhat.com). If you're a Red Hat customer, please continue to file support cases via the Red Hat customer portal. If you're not, please head to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira and file new tickets here. Individual Bugzilla bugs in the statuses "NEW", "ASSIGNED", and "POST" are being migrated throughout September 2023. Bugs of Red Hat partners with an assigned Engineering Partner Manager (EPM) are migrated in late September as per pre-agreed dates. Bugs against components "kernel", "kernel-rt", and "kpatch" are only migrated if still in "NEW" or "ASSIGNED". If you cannot log in to RH Jira, please consult article #7032570. That failing, please send an e-mail to the RH Jira admins at rh-issues@redhat.com to troubleshoot your issue as a user management inquiry. The email creates a ServiceNow ticket with Red Hat. Individual Bugzilla bugs that are migrated will be moved to status "CLOSED", resolution "MIGRATED", and set with "MigratedToJIRA" in "Keywords". The link to the successor Jira issue will be found under "Links", have a little "two-footprint" icon next to it, and direct you to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira (issue links are of type "https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-XXXX", where "X" is a digit). This same link will be available in a blue banner at the top of the page informing you that that bug has been migrated.
Bug 1319280 - spec file source url in bind uses ftp instead of https
Summary: spec file source url in bind uses ftp instead of https
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED ERRATA
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
Classification: Red Hat
Component: bind
Version: 7.3
Hardware: Unspecified
OS: Unspecified
low
low
Target Milestone: rc
: ---
Assignee: Tomáš Hozza
QA Contact: Petr Sklenar
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2016-03-18 17:00 UTC by Andrew Shewmaker
Modified: 2016-11-04 01:26 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

Fixed In Version: bind-9.9.4-34.el7
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2016-11-04 01:26:38 UTC
Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)


Links
System ID Private Priority Status Summary Last Updated
Red Hat Product Errata RHBA-2016:2233 0 normal SHIPPED_LIVE bind bug fix and enhancement update 2016-11-03 13:27:38 UTC

Description Andrew Shewmaker 2016-03-18 17:00:39 UTC
Description of problem:

"... what guarantee is there that no MITM attacker compromised the tarballs when they were downloaded from upstream by a distro package maintainer? ..."

from https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2016/03/13/do-you-trust-this-package/

I spot checked a few spec files: bind, dracut, git, python, and systemd. It appeared that they all used plain ftp and http urls in their source field instead of something like https.

Shouldn't the sources refer to more secure urls? Does Red Hat verify
checksums? Or are their other procedures Red Hat has put in place to
address basic man-in-the-middle attack concerns?

I realize that paranoia can be a rabbit hole, but it seems like gradually migrating to https would be a relatively easy improvement. Maybe you're already in the process?

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:


Steps to Reproduce:

Looking at the bind package, for example ...

1. Go to https://git.centos.org/log/rpms!bind/refs!heads!c7
2. Click on top reference 
3. Click on spec file
4. Search for Source

Actual results:

Source:   ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/bind9/%{VERSION}/bind-%{VERSION}.tar.gz

Expected results:

Source:   https://ftp.isc.org/isc/bind9/%{VERSION}/bind-%{VERSION}.tar.gz

Additional info:

Comment 2 Tomáš Hozza 2016-03-21 08:37:00 UTC
(In reply to Andrew Shewmaker from comment #0)
> Description of problem:
> 
> "... what guarantee is there that no MITM attacker compromised the tarballs
> when they were downloaded from upstream by a distro package maintainer? ..."
> 
> from https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2016/03/13/do-you-trust-this-package/
> 
> I spot checked a few spec files: bind, dracut, git, python, and systemd. It
> appeared that they all used plain ftp and http urls in their source field
> instead of something like https.
> 
> Shouldn't the sources refer to more secure urls? Does Red Hat verify
> checksums? Or are their other procedures Red Hat has put in place to
> address basic man-in-the-middle attack concerns?

The URL in SPEC is not used during the build process. It is there just as a reference of where the sources can be found. We download the sources only once and upload them to internal storage. Then for any build the tarball from the internal storage is used.

Also when downloading latest version of sources, I use HTTPS and I always verify the GPG signature of the tarball.

> I realize that paranoia can be a rabbit hole, but it seems like gradually
> migrating to https would be a relatively easy improvement. Maybe you're
> already in the process?

Sure, we could change the URL to use HTTPS instead of FTP. Nevertheless in reality this will have no impact on the trustworthiness of the sources or of the build process.

Comment 3 Andrew Shewmaker 2016-03-22 15:58:19 UTC
(In reply to Tomas Hozza from comment #2)
> The URL in SPEC is not used during the build process. It is there just as a
> reference of where the sources can be found. We download the sources only
> once and upload them to internal storage. Then for any build the tarball
> from the internal storage is used.
> 
> Also when downloading latest version of sources, I use HTTPS and I always
> verify the GPG signature of the tarball.
> 
> > I realize that paranoia can be a rabbit hole, but it seems like gradually
> > migrating to https would be a relatively easy improvement. Maybe you're
> > already in the process?
> 
> Sure, we could change the URL to use HTTPS instead of FTP. Nevertheless in
> reality this will have no impact on the trustworthiness of the sources or of
> the build process.

Thanks for explaining how Red Hat's process works, and I'm glad my bug
report was unnecessary.

Comment 9 errata-xmlrpc 2016-11-04 01:26:38 UTC
Since the problem described in this bug report should be
resolved in a recent advisory, it has been closed with a
resolution of ERRATA.

For information on the advisory, and where to find the updated
files, follow the link below.

If the solution does not work for you, open a new bug report.

https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2016-2233.html


Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.