Re: [Tails-dev] HTML prototype for new download page

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Autore: sajolida
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To: The Tails public development discussion list, Uzair Farooq, anonym
CC: Muhammad Usman Subhani
Oggetto: Re: [Tails-dev] HTML prototype for new download page
Uzair Farooq:
> We made the commit on top of existing repo, here
> https://github.com/usman-subhani/Tails-repos


Yeah, I like that!

I merged your changes in the production website so you can test it from:

    http://tails.boum.org/install/download_2


I also:

- Hid the "Update extension" that was displayed by default.
- Hid the <input> that you added for the file chooser.

So far so good!

> Here's how to install Firefox extension
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Temporary_Installation_in_Firefox
> . There's a video tutorial at the end.


I tried this as well and installing the extension like this works, yeah!

But then the extension doesn't work: it takes a full core starts eating
as much RAM as it can. See this screencast:

https://dl.poivron.org/n7exagegay7wmynbugh4-ekzsjrqmajdq5lyn

Also, I see in the report for the extension itself that you decided to
start a code base from scratch. Our initial idea was to instead base
your work on the current code base from Giorgio Maone, but I also
understand that given the fact that the scope of the extension has been
drastically reduced after we removed the download from it and that the
download page has been completely rewritten, it might make more sense
for you to start from scratch. So that's not a problem as such.

Still, as initial comments (because I can't really understand your code
beyond that), I see:

- That you are embedding a crypto library to compute the SHA256
(scripts/vendor/sha256.js) while the previous code didn't do that.
In tails-download-and-verify/lib/hash.js he seems to use a build-in
function from Firefox with:

  let hasher = Cc["@mozilla.org/security/hash;1"]
                 .createInstance(Ci.nsICryptoHash);
  hasher.init(hasher.SHA256);


https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XPCOM/Reference/Interface/nsICryptoHash

If this is still possible with WebExtensions, why not do that?

Because auditing and maintaining crypto primitives is not really
something we want to go into...

- That you don't pin on the SSL certificate of our certificate authority
(Let's Encrypt).

See:

- https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/bootstrapping/extension/#index5h2
- tails-download-and-verify/lib/cert-pinner.js in the current code

I'm sorry if I didn't point you to this document before but I didn't
expect that you would rewrite the internals of the verification
mechanism and would rather reuse Giorgio's code.