Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

OpenBSD Moving Towards Signed Packages — Based On D. J. Bernstein Crypto

Posted by Soulskill on from the those-signatures-will-be-worth-a-lot-of-money-some-day dept.

ConstantineM writes "It's official: 'we are moving towards signed packages,' says Theo de Raadt on the misc@ mailing list. This is shortly after a new utility, signify, was committed into the base tree. The reason a new utility had to be written in the first place is that gnupg is too big to fit on the floppy discs, which are still a supported installation medium for OpenBSD. Signatures are based on the Ed25519 public-key signature system from D. J. Bernstein and co., and his public domain code once again appears in the base tree of OpenBSD, only a few weeks after some other DJB inventions made it into the nearby OpenSSH as well."

1 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Overly paranoid by johnwbyrd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I started using OpenBSD in 1998. It was a viable, timely competitor to Linux at the time, especially for building firewalls as such.

    OpenBSD is a great example of what happens when you make life too difficult for end users and administrators in the name of Security. OpenBSD has never embraced the most recent release of anything -- if it's new, by definition it's insecure and it can't be trusted. Ergo, if you have to demonstrate the latest technology in whatever you're doing, you start with a Linux distribution.

    From the article: "We wanted a tool that would fit on installation media, which meant minimizing code size and external dependencies." That's the breakage mode, in a nutshell. NO ONE in the world has been clamoring for an OpenBSD signing tool that runs on a floppy. But the designers are imagining the user requirements based on their own biases. This way lies the death of any commercial or open source software product.