Answers to your questions about Apple and security

Re:Answers to your questions about Apple and security by darkr on Monday February 22, 2016 @05:58PM (#11155054)

> That stuff (checking hashes, etc) is currently mostly theatre because, as you say, a nation-state can easily serve you different hashes to check.

This is why as well as serving those hashes over HTTPS, you sign the hashes with a key, the public part of which is distributed/retrievable/verifiable via some other means.

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Re:Answers to your questions about Apple and security by EdHominem on Monday February 22, 2016 @07:29PM (#11155498)

Right. But if I were attacking you and was in your site and knew that you signed your hashes I'd be targeting your build script to save your key and passphrase, or build a backdoored version at the same time. Something like Certificate Transparency for code-signing would be really solid though; tampering would stand out. https://www.certificate-transparency.org/log-proofs-work

I think there's value in the purely user-based solution though. If two people go to a site at the same time and aren't served the same binary they should be curious why, even if the company securely and auditably signed both images.

And, it helps in all the cases when companies don't implement great release-security.

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