MX Linux Forum

Adrian wrote: I see some people sign the md5sums and some people sign the ISOs, from what I understand the advantage of signing the md5sums is that it's a quick operation to sign a one line text file, while it takes a long time to sign a ISO, but if you sign the ISO if you verify the signature you don't need to verify the md5sum too, am I right? (It's still good to provide md5sums because some people don't bother to verify signatures)

Not 100% sure, but I would guess if the iso is verified then it should be good to go i.e. not corrupted by a download.

I would have thought that verifying the actual iso (that is after all what is going to be installed) is better for security.

anticapitalista wrote:Peppermint: http://peppermintos.com/gpg-verification/

Ubuntu: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Verif ... _signature

Ahh, the Peppermint link has the answer for Windows:

Windows Users

Windows users can download and install GPG (Gpg4win) from here:

https://gpg4win.org/download.html

Then substitute “gpg” with “C:\Program Files\Gnu\GnuPg\gpg.exe” in the four commands above.

Adrian wrote:

anticapitalista wrote:Peppermint: http://peppermintos.com/gpg-verification/

Ubuntu: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Verif ... _signature

I see some people sign the md5sums and some people sign the ISOs, from what I understand the advantage of signing the md5sums is that it's a quick operation to sign a one line text file, while it takes a long time to sign a ISO, but if you sign the ISO if you verify the signature you don't need to verify the md5sum too, am I right? (It's still good to provide md5sums because some people don't bother to verify signatures)

Oberon from Manjaro recommends gpa which seems to be a self explanatory GUI for GPG.
From security standpoint signing the .iso or the iso.md5 is (almost) equivalent. A signature also provides the security service of integrity, so you don't need to verify an md5sum.
The trade-off would be in terms of performacne vs. ease of use. It seem to be obviously faster to sign an iso.md5 (or iso.sha1) which you need to have calculated before.
But in fact it is not so obvious, because it also depends on the machine. Mine takes very long (several minutes) for md5sum checks, but it takes much less time (half a minute) for a signature check of .iso file. Well, you need to import the key once for each distro.

This is still security related--if we ever implement https for the passwords here and for the community pages, I see letsencrypt is now in jessie-backports. That's a weak point if passwords are sent in the clear, then the links and directions could be hacked.

Stevo wrote:This is still security related--if we ever implement https for the passwords here and for the community pages, I see letsencrypt is now in jessie-backports. That's a weak point if passwords are sent in the clear, then the links and directions could be hacked.

I agree, we need to use https for the forum.

Adrian wrote:

Stevo wrote:This is still security related--if we ever implement https for the passwords here and for the community pages, I see letsencrypt is now in jessie-backports. That's a weak point if passwords are sent in the clear, then the links and directions could be hacked.

I agree, we need to use https for the forum.

Still in the wings and not forgotten.

Should I stop my MX-15 (32/64bit) torrents in qbittorrent, check them and then restart them?

KernSpy wrote:Should I stop my MX-15 (32/64bit) torrents in qbittorrent, check them and then restart them?

No.

OK, Thanks!

GPA (GNU Privacy Assistant) looks like the GUI for xfce.

It looks like we should recommend Windows users use the GPA included with Gpg4win for a GUI, there's some big fat version, but also a lite, then an even smaller "vanilla" version. I think the "Lite" version, which has GPA, looks good.