On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 10:00 AM Herbert Valerio Riedel
On 2015-04-28 at 18:13:47 +0200, Michael Snoyman wrote:
[...]
Your analysis is accurate. There are some interesting approaches we could take to further mitigate things. For example: newer versions of cabal-install could automatically set an incorrect username/password in the ~/.cabal/config file, and create a new set of fields (ssl-username/ssl-password?) that it would recognize.
Now that you mention that; the typical default config entry looks like:
remote-repo: hackage.haskell.org:http:// hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive
For a TLS-capable cabal-install (for which I'll assume it'll use digest-auth), I'd suggest (as a strawman proposal - so please criticize!) that it
a) when creating a default-config, write
remote-repo: hackage.haskell.org:https:// hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive
b) if a cabal upload operation is performed,
1) if remote-repo points to a http:// url, Warn the user in a visible scary way that can't easily be ignored that he/she should switch to a https:// url; however, proceed w/ the requested operation using digest-auth
2) if remote-repo points to a https:// url, operate w/o warning (could use basic-auth instead of digest-auth, if we wanted to avoid an additional round-trip at the HTTP-layer)
c) for non-authorised operations, emit less-scary warnings as a friendly reminder to update the repo-url to a https:// capable one
So once a the cabal-config file points to a https://, url, the risk of older non-TLS-capable cabal-installs leaking credentials via unencrypted HTTP would be solved (at the expense of older cabal-install versions not being able to communicate via https:// urls at all...)
Cheers, hvr
I'd probably be more aggressive, and simply rewrite the cabal.config for users (with a message) to change http://hackage... to https://hackage. But I'm OK with just give a bunch of warnings to encourage the user to do it him/herself.