Does Debian already provide signature on .deb files (that is, provide a manifest of their hashes and and sign each)? If so, you could potentially d/l the files from any source/mirror?
Which I suppose is what in-toto is at its core, but it's taken me a long time and lots of reading to get to that point, and I'm not seeing the advantages of it (except it being a standard, OK, fair enough).
I must be missing something.
1. I guess this depend on your position. In the context of remote attestation, I think this is also even dangerous / evil.
It's cool until it becomes enforced and we no longer hold the keys to our own hardware; bwim the ability to determine which key signers are to be trusted. But I don't think standing in the way of attestation tech is a fruitful tactic - much better to fight for hardware/key control.
> Does Debian already provide signature on .deb files (that is, provide a manifest of their hashes and and sign each)?
Yes it does. If you look at https://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/trixie/InRelease it's a PGP-signed file containing a list of files and their hashes. Each of those files (eg https://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/trixie/main/binary-amd64...) then contains a list of .deb files along with their shasums. In other words, a Debian repo is a set of deb files, metadata files with their hashes, index files with hashes of the metadata files, and PGP signatures for the indexes, so the whole chain can be verified.
This means that anyone can set up a deb mirror by (essentially, there's some extra steps) copying that entire structure and the integrity is guaranteed because only the upstream admins can sign the metadata.
Signing files is 90's security.
Yes, of course in 2026 it is still perfectly capable of proving a file has not been tampered with.
The problem is that is insufficient in 2026.
See the "Goals to protect against specific attacks" section[1] of TUF (The Update Framework) spec to give you an idea of modern attack vectors.
[1] https://theupdateframework.github.io/specification/v1.0.33/#...
https://github.com/in-toto/specification/blob/v1.0/in-toto-s...
They could have done better, though, by using XML!
Also this doesn’t take into consideration one of the ugliest sides of SSC which is M&A. Sure on a completely greenfield piece of software, seems like it would be a solution (although over engineered tbh). But that doesn’t really exist in closed source systems as they are Frankenstein pieces of software that get new stuff bolted onto them.
https://nesbitt.io/2026/05/24/signing-is-for-the-bad-days.ht...