[Whonix-devel] GNU Guix Questions

Tue Mar 7 12:05:51 CET 2017

On 17-03-07 00:59:08, bancfc at openmailbox.org wrote:
> On 2017-03-06 17:15, ng0 wrote:
> > Hi bancfc,
> > 
> 
> Hi ng0, great to see you here :)
> 
> > On 17-03-06 16:14:08, bancfc at openmailbox.org wrote:
> > > Hi Guix devs, I am a privacy distro dev and we are looking at using
> > > Guix in
> > > our OS. I have a few questions:
> > > 
> > > * Is the Guix package archive available from a Tor hidden service?
> > > There are
> > > many advantages of updating a system over Tor such as preventing a
> > > target
> > > adversary from fingerprinting and targeting hosts that run vulnerable
> > > packages and protecting systems in case the package manager has a
> > > security
> > > bug. Debian and Tor now provide onion mirrors for their packages.
> > > Can you
> > > please consider doing the same?
> > 
> > As far as I know this might be discussed currently at GNU
> > sysadministration level,
> > at least that's the last info I got when I suggested this last week to
> > RMS.
> > There is an onion mirror which is run by another community. It doesn't
> > mirror alpha.gnu.org yet (where guix binaries are located), but it plans
> > to do so. I need to get in touch with the community to ask wether they
> > would be okay with more bandwidth.
> > Do you have an estimation on how high your usage would be for the guix
> > download from the onion mirror?
> > 
> 
> 
> The amount for bandwidth is approximately the size of GNUnet x 15K users.

I think we have a misunderstanding here. Do you mean access to the
releases of Guix as in what's on
https://alpha.gnu.org/whatever/the/path/to/guix/was, where the software
itself is released, or did you mean what we call 'binary substitutes' in
Guix, the packages which are build from the guix.git master which
feature the software (here software as in tor, perl, epiphany, gnupg,
etc)?
Now that I'm reading your initial email again it reads as if could be
either or both. It would be good if you try to clarify this.

> Later on we will expand the selection to include Tor Browser once you
> package it - if that pans out that would be a massive achievement. The

FYI:
The torbrowser I am packaging initially is a 1:1 copy of what torbrowser
team is keeping in the git repository. Nix for example decided to
just patchelf the binary releases of torbrowser (the tar files found on
dist.torproject.org), this is not acceptable for the work for Guix.
So I'm trying my way with building from git tags. If there are other
people interested and willing to help (once I have something to debug),
I will share recipes / git repositories to work on it.
Furthermore the final package version for Guix will include fixes which
might be needed, similar to what icecat does to firefox esr, to include
it in Guix. This is of course no 1:1 torbrowser then anymore and must
not be described as such. It'll be interesting to see if at all it
differs in fingerprinting from torbrowser.
If for any reason you need the full 1:1 copy we can talk about this once I/we
are getting there, offlist or at least not on guix-devel at gnu.org.

> Torproject have discussed packaging it for years but they couldn't work it
> out because of the breakneck speed of development and the cumbersome process
> of creating Debian packages. Meanwhile anonymity distros were forced to come
> up with a workaround safe downloader mechanism in absence of a package
> fecthable from a package manager. Its been a high maintenance effort over
> the years and a Guix package would finally solve this.
> 
> Another "wishlist" package would be GNU-libre kernel that includes the
> Grsecurity patchset so we can include that out of the box instead of
> requiring users to manually patch and tweak settings with every (weekly) new
> upstream release.

I think HEADS (the linux-libre grsec devuan based blend) did this, or they
are working on it. I know for Guix, someone is working on SELinux. I
think if you are looking into getting a GRSec enabled kernel with
according policies, this must be answered by someone who knows more
about the core of Guix.
It might also be the case that I don't fully understand your plan. What
I read sounds like you are either mixing up Guix and GuixSD or as if
the differences between both need to be explained. It would be easier to
know the current state of the system, and where you want to go with this.

> I realize I'm going offtopic but its really exciting to finally find a
> better way to package things.
> 
> > > 
> > > * Does Guix defend against the variety of attacks described in the TUF
> > > threat model document? (described in link below) How resilient is it
> > > against
> > > key compromise? (TUF was designed from the ground up to provide a
> > > highly
> > > resilient and secure update framework as a drop in replacement to
> > > crappy
> > > standalone updaters - a problem that's become very serious for
> > > proprietary
> > > OSes. The security research and implementation behind it are an
> > > excellent
> > > rubric that one can apply to any updater/package manager.)
> > > 
> > > https://github.com/theupdateframework/tuf/blob/develop/SECURITY.md
> > > 
> > > 
> > > * How does one setup a third part package archive? After looking at
> > > the
> > > manual I believe its as simple as fetching source from one's git repo?
> > > 
> > > Thanks
> > > _______________________________________________
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