[144262] trunk/dports/lang/py-htmldocs/Portfile

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Jan 7, 2016, at 5:53 AM, Russell Jones <russell.jones at physics.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Daniel's point: checking an SSL cert provides a guarantee from some certificate issuer, given a competent sysadmin, etc, that the host name matches it.

When you validate an SSL certificate all you end up with is the assurance that some Certificate Authority has issued a certificate for that hostname.

There are lots of CAs and they aren't immune to process (or other) issues (see also DigiNotar). There's a reason why there has been interest in public key pinning (and DANE + DNSSEC) - so you end up with a greater assurance.

> Do you have some reason to think there are issuers in the root certificate list that would issue bogus python.org certs? Or are you talking about a cert being stolen? I'm not sure what you mean by "just ... valid".

I don't have reason to believe either of those things is currently happening - but I have reason to believe either is possible, and we shouldn't decide to rely on neither happening.

Even in the non-malicious case, a re-org of files on python.org would yield unknown behavior (the file at that url could change, and in the base case we would get an error - in the worst case anything could be in that file).

-- 
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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