bug#22883: Trustable "guix pull"

[Leo Famulari]

On Wed, Mar 02, 2016 at 10:03:59AM -0800, Christopher Allan Webber wrote:
> Right now, when a user does a "guix pull", that pulls down the latest
> repository of code from git, which is kept in a tarball.  Once you
> receive the latest code, this has some checks: what's the hash of each
> package, etc.

A discussion worth having. But, let's merge this bug into
debbugs.gnu.org/22629. Also, we should read "The Update Framework" as
requested there.

> 
> Unfortunately, it's delivered over http:
> 
>   (define %snapshot-url
>     ;; "http://hydra.gnu.org/job/guix/master/tarball/latest/download";
>     "http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/snapshot/master.tar.gz";
>     )
> 
> At minimum we should deliver this over HTTPS, ideally with a single
> certificate that is trusted by the user, so the user can't be easily
> MITM'ed.
> 
> On top of that, even if you run from git proper what there isn't a test
> about is: can you trust those latest commits?  Git doesn't really check,
> at least by default.
> 
>   https://mikegerwitz.com/papers/git-horror-story
> 
> How about this: anyone with commit access should use "signed off by" and
> gpg signatures combined.  We should keep some list of guix committers'
> gpg keys.  No commit should be pushed to guix without a gpg signature.
> At this point, at least, there is some possibility of auditing things.
> 
> Perhaps before a master.tar.gz is made, there can be some integrity
> check of the commits matching the current set of "trusted" keys?
> 
> 
>