Re: [ease-dev] [EASE-dev] Introduction

[Jonah Graham <jonah@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Varun,

As part of this investigation, knowing a bit about what key signing is
already done by Eclipse may be useful. As it happens Mikaël Barbero
just wrote a summary on the cbi-dev  list.
http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/cbi-dev/msg01652.html

Jonah
~~~
Jonah Graham
Kichwa Coders Ltd.
www.kichwacoders.com


On 9 March 2016 at 07:30, Christian Pontesegger
<christian.pontesegger@xxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi Varun,
>
> first, just call me Christian, 'sir' is definitely not required :)
>
> The general idea of signing scripts is that eg eclipse may put up some
> scripts on their web servers which users may consume. As scripts are
> potentially dangerous - they would have access to the local file system -
> users want to be sure that remote scripts are safe and untampered. Basically
> very similar to an https connection. You rely on some root certificates to
> be sure that you may trust these scripts. Self signing certificates might be
> used, but it will be harder for the user to decide on the trust level of
> such certificates.
>
> For option 1 this means that we need to retrieve public keys from script
> authors first and import them before we can verify scripts. This is an
> option, but forces the user to manually deal with security stuff.
>
> Option 2 uses the keystore and its root certificates automatically. Eg
> scripts signed by eclipse.org would be recognized as safe out of the box. I
> prefer this one. We then need some UI to ask the user for unknown
> certificates if he wants to trust them and eventually import them into the
> keystore.
>
> Option 3 is not needed, as eclipse can do this automatically during the
> build. Scripts delivered within a jar are already on the localhost, so it is
> easier to make sure these scripts are safe.
>
> Regarding CSRs I do not think that eclipse would start signing keys for
> anybody. So I guess for this project we can rely on certificates that either
> are already part of your keystore or could be imported into it.
>
> I like that you already play around with the code and give it a try!
>
> cheers
>
> Christian
>
> _______________________________________________
> ease-dev mailing list
> ease-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
> To change your delivery options, retrieve your password, or unsubscribe from
> this list, visit
> https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/ease-dev