Hi Tom, On 3/15/2016 5:34 AM, Tom Kent wrote:

I would really like to see the core release team adopt a similar procedure in their release. This would only take a few steps:

1. Switch from md5 sums to a secure hash, such as SHA-256.

You make it sounds as if the use of md5 checksums is a huge problem, but I think that for release checking we only care about second-preimage resistance, and there's no remotely practical attack on md5 still. Of course, sha2 is better and just as easy to compute.

2. Sign these sums with a secure PGP/GPG key. 3. Publish this signed file with the sums alongside the downloads.

This is indeed not very hard to do, but do you think many people will go to the trouble of: - Getting PGP key of a release manager and verifying that - Checking signature of the sums file - Checking the checksum proper Maybe detached GPG signature of release binary itself will be a tad more convenient? -- Vladimir Prus http://vladimirprus.com

On 03/16/2016 12:36 PM, Tom Kent wrote:

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2. Sign these sums with a secure PGP/GPG key.

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3. Publish this signed file with the sums alongside the downloads.

This is indeed not very hard to do, but do you think many people will go to the trouble of:

- Getting PGP key of a release manager and verifying that - Checking signature of the sums file - Checking the checksum proper

Maybe detached GPG signature of release binary itself will be a tad more convenient?

No, I don't think many people at all will care one iota about this, I would expect less than 1%. However, of that 1% that might care at all, I would expect 90% of those would just care that they got a valid download and want to check the sums, only that final 10% of the 1% would want to verify the signature. Because of this, I think it is better to have a separate sums file....but I would be completely happy with either solution.

In the end those few situations could be package maintainer for Linux distributions or alternative package managers like brew for OSX in need of verifying the Boost release they got for their thousands of users. For example, here's how brew does it currently:

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/blob/master/Library/Formula/boost.rb

And although there is a SHA256 checksum in there, it probably comes from the initial developer downloading the Boost release and calculating the checksum locally, as there are no checksums I could find from the Boost Release Team. Therefore all it does is verifying file integrity _for the file that Sourceforge hosts_.