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+- Feature Name: verified_registry_commits
+- Start Date: 2018-05-08
+- RFC PR: (leave this empty)
+- Rust Issue: (leave this empty)
+
+# Summary
+[summary]: #summary
+
+Enable commits to crate registry indexes to be signed & verified, providing
+stronger guarantees as to the authenticity of their content and (transitively)
+guaranteeing the authenticity of the content of the packages in the registry.
+
+# Motivation
+[motivation]: #motivation
+
+Crate registries like the crates.io registry are a way of distributing source
+code which is ultimately built and executed on end user machines. It is vital
+that users receive valid source files for the packages they download,
+especially because a malicious package could be a major attack vector to harm
+users of Rust, or users of those users' projects.
+
+The index of a registry is a git repository downloaded by cargo over HTTPS or
+SSH. This index contains information about each package, including a SHA-256
+checksum of the content of that package. When cargo downloads a package from
+the registry, its contents are verified against that checksum. This is intended
+to guarantee that the content the user downloads is the same data this referred
+to by the registry index.
+
+However, a malicious or otherwise ill-behaved third party could conceivably
+(such as with a MITM attack) intercept the download of the index and modify the
+checksum of a package, allowing them later to modify the content of that
+package when the user requests it. They could also, conceivably, modify the
+index repository at its central storage, making similar malicious edits which
+will be accepted by every user.
+
+If the content of the registry index could be authenticated in a stronger way,
+this would make it more difficult for an attacker to modify index data. Because
+the registry is a git repository, and a git repository is a kind of [merkle
+tree][merkle], signing a commit verifies the content of all the data that
+commit contains (modulo the security properties of the repository's hash
+function - a discussion of SHA-1 is later in this RFC). Because a hash of each
+package contents is contained in the index repository, the index as a whole can
+be thought of as a merkle tree, some of the leaves of which are all of the
+packages in the registry.
+
+Signing commits is an effective and cheap way to provide stronger authenticity
+of package contents. It enables cheap key rotation, because a new signature on
+the head of the index repository validates all of the content in the registry.
+Because git already supports commit signing, it is a natural extension of our
+existing practices, rather than a large scale re-engineering of the registry
+system.
+
+# Guide-level explanation
+[guide-level-explanation]: #guide-level-explanation
+
+For normal users, this change should be completely transparent. Whenever the
+index is updated if the registry in question is a registry that ought to be
+signed (a 'signed registry'), the signature of HEAD is verified against the
+public keys which are permitted to sign commits to the index.
+
+## The keys TOML
+
+Inside the `.cargo` directory, a TOML file exists for each signed registry
+containing the public key data for all signers. Public key data is an object
+containing these members:
+
+- `key`: An ASCII armored OpenPGP public key (conforming to RFC 4880)
+- `info` (optional): Information about this key, such as the user it is
+  supposed to belong to, which is not cryptographically verified.
+- `can-commit` (optional): Whether or not this key can be used to create
+  commits to the registry. Boolean; Defaults to false.
+- `can-rotate` (optional): Whether or not this key can be used to perform a key
+  rotation on this registry. Boolean; Defaults to false.
+
+This file is maintained through a key rotation mechanism described later in the
+RFC. It is plain text, and users may freely review or edit it for each registry
+they depend on (though if they remove keys that are not considered invalid by
+the registry administrators, they may break their dependency on that registry).
+
+## When is a registry a signed registry?
+
+Registries are considered signed registries if either of these hold true:
+
+1. Current `HEAD` is a signed commit (by any key).
+2. A keys file exists for that registry.
+
+An attempt to update the `HEAD` of a signed registry to a commit that is not
+signed by one of the existing committer keys is a hard failure that will
+prevent cargo from resolving dependencies in that registry any longer. Until
+the state is fixed, cargo will not generate lockfiles for crates that depend on
+packages in that registry. This includes a commit which is not signed at all.
+
+If the HEAD of a registry is signed but that registry has no signing keys TOML
+file, that registry will be considered a signed registry, but in a broken state,
+because HEAD is signed but there are no trusted signing keys. In general, this
+definition of signed registry is supposed to "fail closed."
+
+## Why PGP formatted keys?
+
+This RFC specifies that keys and signatures are exchanged using PGP format,
+even though it also adds that cargo will not ship a full PGP implementation to
+verify signatures. The PGP format is a rather complex binary format which
+supports many options that are not relevant for our use case: as a result,
+we've specified that we only support a subset of the PGP format. One could
+fairly ask why we use PGP at all instead of a more straightforward solution.
+
+The primary reason to use the PGP format is to integrate with existing git &
+gpg tooling. The subset of PGP we support is compatible with keys generated by
+gpg2 and with signatures on commits made with `git commit -S`. This allows
+users to manually produce and verify signatures as necessary either for
+administrative purposes or to check the correctness of cargo's behavior.
+Additionally, GitHub has a mechanism to host GPG keys associated with a GitHub
+account, which would not be possible for a custom key format.
+
+## Advisory for people running registries
+
+cargo will only validate the signature of the `HEAD` commit, no intermediate
+commits. All committers to the registry **MUST** verify the signature of
+parents to their commits, or the security properties of this system will be
+violated.
+
+Registries are free to make their own policies regarding the distribution of
+keys and when to perform rotations, but if a registry operator commits
+without verifying the signature of that commit's parents, they have
+nullified the benefits of running a signed registry over an unsigned
+registry.
+
+# Reference-level explanation
+[reference-level-explanation]: #reference-level-explanation
+
+## Signature schemes & data formats supported by cargo
+
+Though keys are stored in the OpenPGP format, cargo will not actually verify
+signatures using a complete OpenPGP implementation such as gpg, which would be
+a significant new C dependency to ship to all users. Instead, cargo will use
+pure Rust implementations of established signature schemes, as well as a pure
+Rust parser for a subset of the OpenPGP format.
+
+All signatures are valid OpenPGP signatures, which means they are signatures of
+hashes of the data being signed as well as metadata in accordance with the
+OpenPGP spec ([IETF RFC 4880][rfc4880]).
+
+### OpenPGP subset
+
+All signatures and public keys will be distributed in a subset of the data
+format described in RFC 4880 which is consistent with the behavior of recent
+versions of gpg2 (allowing the manual creation of signatures and keys as
+necessary).
+
+These are the requirements for a signature or public key to be supported by
+cargo:
+
+- It uses what RFC 4880 calls the "old format packet header" for all packets
+- All packets have a two octet length (so the packet header is 3 octets long).
+- Signatures and public keys are both version 4 of their format.
+- It uses one of cargo's supported signature and hash algorithms.
+- The first hashed subpacket of any signature is the public key fingerprint
+  with subpacket type 33 (note this is the 20 byte fingerprint, not the 8 byte
+  key ID).
+
+This conforms to the default behavior of gpg2 and is what is accepted and
+generated by [a Rust implementation of a subset of OpenPGP written by the
+RFC author][pbp].
+
+### Signature and hash algorithms
+
+Our initial implementation will support only one signature algorithm and one
+hash algorithm. This may be extended in time. The signature algorithm is EdDSA
+with curve 25519 (ed25519) and the hash algorithm is SHA-256.
+
+## Signature distribution format
+
+Signatures are distributed in the same manner that git distributes commit
+signatures - as an additional header on the commit, verifying the commits
+contents, commit message, and other headers. This way, users can verify
+index commits using their own version of git, and administrations making manual
+edits to the registry can use git to generate the signatures.
+
+## Key rotation
+
+Key rotation is performed by adding an annotated tag to the index repository,
+called a key rotation tag. A key rotation tag must be signed by a key with the
+`can-rotate` privilege.
+
+A key rotation tag should point to the HEAD commit of the registry index at the
+time it is made. The commit it points to should be signed using a key which is
+in the post-rotation key set.
+
+The name of a key rotation tag must be `rotation-$FORMAT-$N` where $N is an
+integer and $FORMAT is the format used for this rotation; the only format
+specified by this RFC is `v1`. We recommend that registries use a counter
+starting at `0` for `$N`. The number is only significant to distinguish
+rotations from each other, and has no semantic role.
+
+The message body of a key rotation tag in the `v1` format is a TOML document,
+having the same structure as the keys toml which contains the authorized
+signing keys described previously in the RFC.
+
+When cargo updates the index, it will iterate through the new tags matching
+this format that have been added to the repository in their order in the commit
+history. cargo will verify that the tag is signed by a key with the
+`can-rotate` privilege and then update the trusted key set by completely
+replacing it with the signing keys.
+
+## crates.io initial policy
+
+crates.io keys will always contain a GitHub user account name in their `info`
+field (possibly along with other info), and will publish those keys to that
+GitHub account. The current set of crates.io keys will be published on
+rust-lang.org as well. Users can use these other forms of publication to verify
+that the keyset they have is valid.
+
+A single key, belonging to the bors account, will be stored in the crates.io
+service. This key will only have the commit privelege, not the rotate
+privilege. Other keys, with various priveleges, will be stored in an offline
+format, and belong to individual members of the Rust core team. These keys will
+be used for administrative purposes.
+
+Keys, especially the online bors key, may be rotated at irregular intervals,
+not necessarily because of a known compromise. An explanation of the rotation
+will always be published at rust-lang.org. We do not commit to any particular
+rotation schedule.
+
+## Security considerations
+
+### Trust on first use
+
+When a user first downloads a registry index, or transitions an index from
+unsigned to signed, they have no pre-existing trusted keys for that registry.
+For this reason, the first access of a signed registry is a leap of faith in
+which the user also obtains the keys to trust for future updates. A successful
+attack at that point would leave the user will with an invalid index.
+
+We can harden crates.io against attacks at this point by distributing the
+current trusted keys with the rustup distribution, allowing any security
+mechanisms we put in place for the distribution of Rust and cargo binaries to
+also secure this operation.
+
+### An attacker with no keys
+
+An attacker with no keys cannot sign commits or rotation tags. Because of this,
+an attacker with no keys would not be able to modify the registry index, even
+if they were able to defeat the existing security measures like our use of
+HTTPS or SSH to transmit the index data over the network.
+
+However, such an attacker could still prevent the user from receiving updates
+to the index by - for example - MITMing their connection to the git server to
+report that there is no update. Such an attack could keep users from receiving
+essential security updates to their dependencies. Hardening cargo against this
+sort of attack is left as future work.
+
+### An attacker with a `can-commit` key
+
+An attacker who has compromised a key with the `can-commit` privilege could
+make commits to the index, modifying the data. This would essentially revert
+the system to its security properties before this RFC.
+
+However, if a key compromise of this sort is discovered, an automated key
+rotation could remove the compromised key from the set, restoring the security
+properties of the system.
+
+### An attacker with a `can-rotate` key
+
+An attacker who has compromised a key with the `can-rotate` privilege could
+rotate the key set, adding and removing keys at will. This would allow them to
+take control of the index, preventing legitimate updates (such as key
+rotations) from reaching users. If a `can-rotate` key were compromised, it
+would likely be very disruptive to all users.
+
+For that reason, crates.io will adopt policy that `can-rotate` keys are stored
+in an offline medium, with due security precautions. As a future hardening, we
+could also support a threshold signature scheme, requiring signatures from
+multiple `can-rotate` keys to perform a key rotation, reducing the impact of
+compromising a single key with this privilege.
+
+### SHA-1
+
+The security of this system hinges on the security of the hash function used to
+implement the git repository. Unfortunately, git currently uses SHA-1, a hash
+function with known flaws that allow for collision attacks. A successful
+collision attack against a crate index would nullify the security benefits of
+this RFC: an attacker would be able to swap out one commit for another which
+would both appear to be signed.
+
+However, there are a few mitigating factors which make this RFC worthwhile to
+pursue despite these problems:
+
+1. The SHAttered collision attack depends on the ability to control data in
+both colliding objects in order to create a collision (that is, they cannot
+create a collision with an arbitrary hash). Hypothetically, an attacker could
+upload a crate to the registry with index metadata that they can use to create
+a collision; however, this increases the difficulty significantly in comparison
+to the SHAttered case.
+2. Even the SHAttered case was prohibitively expensive. Breaking into one of
+our administrators' homes to copy their signing key is probably cheaper.
+3. Our current git host, GitHub, checks for the signs of this sort of collision
+attack and would not accept an object containing a collision.
+
+That said, we take the weakness of SHA-1 seriously, and will commit to
+switching to a stronger hash function as soon as it is possible for us to do
+so. In order to do that, git needs to be updated to support a new hash
+function, and that upgrade needs to be supported by both GitHub (which hosts
+our index) and libgit2 (which cargo uses for git operations).
+
+# Drawbacks
+[drawbacks]: #drawbacks
+
+The primary drawback of this is that it increases the operational complexity of
+managing crates.io, and the complexity of the cargo codebase. The Rust
+infrastructure and dev-tools teams would be taking on the burden of maintaining
+this system & provisioning and protecting secret keys. The additional security
+benefits of this RFC will depend on their key management practices.
+
+# Rationale and alternatives
+[alternatives]: #alternatives
+
+The primary alternative to a security enhancement like this would be to switch
+wholesale to [TUF][tuf], a complete, designed framework for secure upgrades.
+
+TUF as described by its spec is not backward compatible with the existing
+registry index format that cargo uses. We could not simply bolt on TUF to
+cargo, we would have to do a complete system change over. Such a change over is
+expensive in terms of our resource allocation and in terms of the user
+experience of migration: realistically, we would not be able to prioritize it
+in the near future. Even if we do some day switch to TUF, it is worthwhile to
+moderately improve the security of our system *now*.
+
+The specified format for TUF target files is also not designed to be an
+efficient mechanism for storing the index for a package repository like cargo.
+It stores the data cargo would store in its index in a single, large JSON file.
+cargo's use of a git-based index was designed on the basis of its original
+authors' experience with package managers like this - specifically, the issue
+of monotonic, incremental updates, and of parsing only the information for the
+specific packages needed in dependency resolution. For this reason, TUF would
+likely need to be modified nontrivially to support crates.io, making it an even
+larger task to switch to TUF.
+
+Given all of this, an incremental change like signing the repository git
+commits seems advantageous given that we cannot perform a migration to TUF at
+this time.
+
+# Prior art
+[prior-art]: #prior-art
+
+The most important prior art is the [TUF][tuf] specification, described in the
+previous section. It would be good to continue to take learnings from TUF as we
+try to improve the security of our infrastructure.
+
+# Unresolved questions
+[unresolved]: #unresolved-questions
+
+No major unresolved questions as of this time.
+
+
+[tuf]: https://theupdateframework.github.io/
+[rfc4880]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4880
+[pbp]: https://github.com/withoutboats/pbp
+[merkle]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree