Securing Perl: cpanm HTTPS + verify_SSL + verify signatures?

[dweekly]

Hi! I'm starting to work across the community to try and help "Securing Perl" by encouraging the checking of module signatures, moving mirrors to HTTPS, nudging defaults toward connecting to HTTPS mirrors when possible, and checking server SSL certificates.

Specific to cpanm, I'm wondering if it makes sense to:

• Update all HTTP::Tiny->new to include verify_SSL=>1, since HTTP::Tiny doesn't verify SSL certificates by default when using https (see discussion)
• Use https:// URLs when at all possible to pull metadata and packages. Over half of the CPAN mirrors already support mirroring over TLS!
• verify SIGNATURES and CHECKSUMs by default

Is there interest in updating cpanm in this way or thoughts on the approach here?

[miyagawa]

verify_SSL is already the default in the Menlo version of cpanm on our git repo. This version can be fetched via Menlo::Legacy distribution.
https://github.com/miyagawa/cpanminus/blob/devel/Menlo-Legacy/lib/Menlo/CLI/Compat.pm#L2742

Using https URL by default is challenging because that will make cpanm not work out of the box when the system doesn't support HTTPS (you don't have openssl, you don't have IO::Socket::SSL, your curl/wget doesn't support HTTPS, etc). We have to make it an opt-in so that existing users of this script will continue to work. Same thing applies for SIGNATURES/CHECKSUMS because Module::Signature and gpg/pgp validation is not in perl core.

[miyagawa]

by the way what you just describe is already possible with:

export PERL_CPANM_OPT="-M https://cpan.metacpan.org/ --verify"

assuming you either have LWP + https support (or curl). It will disable querying the http backend for cpanmetadb, and pull everything from the https URL to fetch packages, and run the verifications with signatures/checksums.

I know you're suggesting to change the default, but i can't make a change to the defaults that could break the existing users of the script, because it's widely used in a CI environment and that will be a breaking change.

[dweekly]

Thank you so much for your timely and thoughtful reply! I understand not wanting to introduce breaking changes.

Would it be possible to check for the presence of the required packages and if they are present to set secure defaults that use those packages, such that users with Module::Signature installed will automatically verify module signatures and users with HTTPS support automatically fetch data over HTTPS?

What is your thought about displaying a warning for users who don't have these installed so they know that modules are unchecked / requests are happening via HTTP and there is something they can do about it (install the required modules).

[miyagawa]

--verify is implemented that way, so that if you turn it on while not having Module::Signature it will display a warning and won't actually verify the tarball.

[dweekly]

Excellent. Then it would seem pretty harmless to have --verify enabled by default, yes? I noticed that on the "cpanm --help" screen the "--verify" option isn't visibly shown. Was this intentional, or should we add a line to the help screen for "--verify"?

Would you be open to setting HTTPS as the default when the required packages to implement it are installed?

[miyagawa]

Well, verify slows the installation a bit, and Module::Signature can't be installed on a Mac without installing external CLI tools like gpg, so i'm not keen to changing the default in a way that would result in display a warning for the majority of the users.

I'm open to accept a PR to show --verify in the help screen though.

[tobyink]

Maybe something like cpanm -s could enable HTTPS and verification of signatures?

[nanto]

To respond to Addressing CPAN vulnerabilities related to checksums | NeilB [blogs.perl.org], I think it is time to make HTTPS mirror as default.

If support for old CI environments matters, how about connecting HTTPS at first and then fall back to HTTP? (According to the blog article, CPAN.pm 2.29 behaves in this manner.)

[nanto]

Another solution: delivering old version of cpanm (whose default mirror is http://) via http://cpanmin.us and new version of cpanm (whose default mirror is https://) via https://cpanmin.us.

If a CI environment installs capnm from https://cpanmin.us, that environment might support HTTPS.

[sjn]

Now that we're nearing 2024, how about we make that year into "The CPAN year of «Secure by Default»"? 😁

[stigtsp]

Imho, cpanm should require https and verify certificates by default. With an optional cpanm --insecure for corner cases that do not have tls libraries, are missing cacerts, use self-signed certificates, or want to use http without tls.

[guest20]

HTTP::Tiny's verify_SSL — A boolean that indicates whether to validate the TLS/SSL certificate of an https — connection (default is true). Changed from false to true in version 0.083. (2023-06-11)

[stigtsp]

https by default is PRed here:

• make cpanm secure by default #674
• Enforce TLS for http requests #678 (backport for release branch)

[zakame]

Hi @miyagawa 👋 Chiming in on behalf of https://github.com/Perl/docker-perl via the efforts of @stigtsp, @dgl and others 🙏

docker-perl now ships with SSL modules out of the box, and GnuPG for Module::Signature support is also already baked in since almost the beginning (by way of its buildpack-deps base image) so docker-perl is in a good position to ship with all the requested features in this issue, without interfering with systems in place that lack these requirements - what else can we do to move this along?

This also seems to be a good opportunity to resume Menlo development - we could ship Menlo::CLI::Compat in docker-perl to replace cpanm...