http subversion URLs should be discontinued in favor of https URLs

[Igor Mozolevsky]

On 10 December 2017 at 17:32, John-Mark Gurney <jmg at funkthat.com> wrote:

<snip>


>
> The discussion has been for svn updates over http, not for freebsd-update
> updates which are independantly signed and verified..  There is currently
> no signatures provided via SVN to validate any source received via http.
>
>


There has been no instance of in-transit compromise reported since SVN was
introduced.

Even when the back-end was compromised, there was not detectable compromise
of the codebase [1]. So even if the codebase was compromised, unless people
*really knew* what they were doing, HTTPS would seed a false sense of
security.

There is a number of organisation that your computer is told to trust by
default who have the know-how and capability to mount MITM without one even
knowing unless that one were to manually verify CAs used for host certs,
again, HTTPS doesn't buy anything in that regards.


1. https://www.freebsd.org/news/2012-compromise.html


-- 
Igor M.