[OLPC Security] Developer Key

[Matt Anderson]

On Thu, Feb 22, 2007 at 04:16:59PM +1000, Stephen Thorne wrote:
> This is an interesting idea for the social aspects of the project, but
> I fear that calling it anything that could be confused with the
> "Unlock everything and break your XO and let it get stolen and sold on
> ebay" "developer key" would be a mistake.

I agree.  There is a namespace problem here.  Initially I was thinking
of calling this "developer key lite" but for the reasons you mention
that just seems like a bad idea.

> There is a security side to this - being able to have a web of trust
> of software authors. It's something that will play a role in the
> Develop activity. Andrew Clunis may have some ideas here. I believe
> he's planning to use bzr, which has the ability to sign patches.

Thanks for the links, I'll check them out.  You are going in exactly
the direction I was first thinking of.  Perhaps this is for a different
list, but eventually I was thinking that laptops would recognize that
another system on the mesh network was running an updated version
of a signed program that was installed on that system.  Depending on
how the child had configured it the system may automatically download
the signed patches, or it may only request the patches if the other
version is newer and somehow marked as a stable release.

-matt