Re: HTTPS metadata in Mirrors.masterlist?

On Tue, 11 Feb 2014, Colin Watson wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 01:04:29PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
>> I'm working on adding HTTPS support to d-i.  Now, I know that we already
>> have integrity by way of the GPG signature chain, but this isn't for
>> that; this is in response to feedback Canonical has had from some Ubuntu
>> customers (typically of the large and corporate variety) that they want
>> to do all of their apt traffic over HTTPS to avoid people snooping on
>> which packages various machines are installing.

Let me suggest that if they want to keep it a secret from people able to 
snoop on their network traffic, they might want to consider the much 
stronger protection of running their own mirror. Given the finite space of 
package sizes and deps, clever traffic analysis should be able to figure 
out which packages go over an HTTPS stream too, even if it'll be a bit 
harder than the plaintext stream.

That said, I don't mind more giving the users what they want, but I also 
see no way in which our mirror could provide usable HTTPS, so the mirror 
selection would likely be much smaller.

/Mattias Wadenstein