Sigstore for Apt Archives: apt-cosign

As suggested in my initial announcement of apt-sigstore my plan was to look into stronger uses of Sigstore than rekor, and I’m now happy to announce that the apt-cosign plugin has been added to apt-sigstore and the operational project debdistcanary is publishing cosign-statements about the InRelease file published by the following distributions: Trisquel GNU/Linux, PureOS, Gnuinos, Ubuntu, Debian and Devuan.

Summarizing the commands that you need to run as root to experience the great new world:

# run everything as root: su / sudo -i / doas -s
apt-get install -y apt gpg bsdutils wget
wget -nv -O/usr/local/bin/apt-verify-gpgv https://gitlab.com/debdistutils/apt-verify/-/raw/main/apt-verify-gpgv
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/apt-verify-gpgv
mkdir -p /etc/apt/verify.d
ln -s /usr/bin/gpgv /etc/apt/verify.d
echo 'APT::Key::gpgvcommand "apt-verify-gpgv";' > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/75verify
wget -O/usr/local/bin/cosign https://github.com/sigstore/cosign/releases/download/v2.0.1/cosign-linux-amd64
echo 924754b2e62f25683e3e74f90aa5e166944a0f0cf75b4196ee76cb2f487dd980  /usr/local/bin/cosign | sha256sum -c
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/cosign
wget -nv -O/etc/apt/verify.d/apt-cosign https://gitlab.com/debdistutils/apt-sigstore/-/raw/main/apt-cosign
chmod +x /etc/apt/verify.d/apt-cosign
mkdir -p /etc/apt/trusted.cosign.d
dist=$(lsb_release --short --id | tr A-Z a-z)
wget -O/etc/apt/trusted.cosign.d/cosign-public-key-$dist.txt "https://gitlab.com/debdistutils/debdistcanary/-/raw/main/cosign/cosign-public-key-$dist.txt"
echo "Cosign::Base-URL \"https://gitlab.com/debdistutils/canary/$dist/-/raw/main/cosign\";" > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/77cosign

Then run your usual apt-get update and look in the syslog to debug things.

This is the kind of work that gets done while waiting for the build machines to attempt to reproducibly build PureOS. Unfortunately, the results is that a meager 16% of the 765 added/modifed packages are reproducible by me. There is some infrastructure work to be done to improve things: we should use sbuild for example. The build infrastructure should produce signed statements for each package it builds: One statement saying that it attempted to reproducible build a particular binary package (thus generated some build logs and diffoscope-output for auditing), and one statements saying that it actually was able to reproduce a package. Verifying such claims during apt-get install or possibly dpkg -i is a logical next step.

There is some code cleanups and release work to be done now. Which distribution will be the first apt-based distribution that includes native support for Sigstore? Let’s see.

Sigstore is not the only relevant transparency log around, and I’ve been trying to learn a bit about Sigsum to be able to support it as well. The more improved confidence about system security, the merrier!

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