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Generate README from README.html

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This was an old lynx --dump that I checked into the repository
originally.  Go back to generating it with lynx --dump instead.
This commit is contained in:
Russ Allbery 2016-10-27 13:56:46 -07:00
parent 719be2adfb
commit d44ab54a66
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3
Makefile
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@ -20,11 +20,12 @@ check test:
# distribution in a subdirectory, and the ARCHIVE area.
dist: release pgpverify.8
mkdir -p staging
rsync -a ARCHIVE FORMAT README* pgpverify pgpverify.8 \
rsync -a ARCHIVE FORMAT pgpverify pgpverify.8 \
sample.control sign.sh signcontrol staging/
cp -p pgpcontrol-$(VERSION).tar.gz staging/
cp $(CONTROL)/PGPKEYS staging/
cp $(CONTROL)/README.html staging/
lynx --dump --nolist staaging/README.html > staging/README
# Generate a tarball of my entire working area, but without the archive of old
# versions of the software.

500
README
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@ -1,500 +0,0 @@
AUTHENTICATION OF USENET GROUP CHANGES
This document addresses a method for the authentication of the special
types of Usenet articles that are used to maintain the namespace of
Usenet groups. A basic familiarity with what the Usenet control
message types "newgroup", "rmgroup" and "checkgroups" do is assumed;
this is not a tutorial in namespace administration.
Usenet articles are notoriously easy to forge, and control messages
are no exception. Since administrators often want to have their news
systems automatically honor requests from some particular people to
add or remove newsgroups, it is risky to trust the From: and Sender:
headers to identify the real sender of a message, as has historically
been done. Thus a system using Philip Zimmerman's Pretty Good
Privacy(tm) (PGP (tm)) was developed to provide a more secure means of
authenticating the sender of a control message.
Unlike traditional PGP authentication of messages, which just verifies
that the contents of the body of a message are unchanged from when it
was digitally "signed", this system also needed to sign a few headers
of the control message to verify the action to be taken and to guard
against certain other pitfalls. Another goal was to make the signature
as unobtrusive as possible and require minimal changes to existing
software in order to work.
How to Verify Control Messages
Listed below are the steps you need to take to enable PGP
authentication of control messages on your system.
WARNING: The instructions for INN below are only for very old versions
of INN. If you are using a current version of INN (2.0 or later),
please see the documentation that comes with INN rather than following
these instructions.
Here is the short and simple version for someone who feels confident
hacking around the news system and doesn't like to read a lot:
1. Get and configure the software:
+ ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/pgpcontrol/pgpverify
+ ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/pgpcontrol/server-patches/
2. Add maintainers' PGP public keys to the news system key ring.
3. Enable verification through the news system authorization system.
INN: Use the action verify-pgp_userid (possibly appended
=logfile) in control.ctl.
C News: Use the action "p" in the fourth field of controlperm
followed by a suitable pgp_userid in the fifth field.
D News: Use the action "doit,pgp" in control.conf.
ANU News:
Use the "HELP ADD FILE PGP_verification" ANU command.
Other systems:
Sorry, not implemented yet.
4. Test pgpverify. If you have the news.announce.newgroups key in
your key ring, run
ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/pgpcontrol/sample.control
through pgpverify on stdin. It should spit out the string
"news.announce.newgroups" on stdout.
Here is a more verbose version of the instructions:
1. Get the software.
There are two pieces of code that will need to be added to a news
server to make use of this authentication system: a stand-alone
script that verifies an article is what it says it is, and a patch
to hook it into the news server's processing of control messages.
The stand-alone program, ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub//pgpcontrol/pgpverify,
is a Perl script that should work with Perl version 4 and up. (I have
not tested it with earlier versions.) It does not contain any code
making it dependent on any particular news server software.
ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/pgpcontrol/server-patches/
has patches for hooking the system into existing news server
software. Choose the one for your system from the list below.
+ INN version 1.4sec
+ INN version 1.4unoff4
+ C News version CR.G
(Courtesy of System Administrator <root@hp9000.laafb.af.mil>
and Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk>)
Newer versions of INN (since 1.5), D News and ANU News (since 6.2.0)
do not need to be patched, as they ship with built-in handling for
pgp verification. You can therefore skip past the "Install it
on your news system" section to "Enable verification for the
hierarchies that interest you". I recommend that you upgrade
to INN 1.5.1sec if you are running any prior INN version,
because it has a few important security problems fixed.
I regret that I do not have the time to develop more patches,
but I will gladly add patches for other systems to this page as
they are made available to me. The INN version 1.4sec patch
will apply to all INN "unoff" versions, albeit with a little
bit of fuzz. I am not positive what versions of C News will
work with the C News CR.G patch; if you try it with C News
CR.E, please let me know how it goes.
2. Install it in your news system.
First you must ensure that the absolute paths to perl and to
pgp are correct in the first few lines of the pgpverify
program. No other configuration of options or pathnames should be
needed.
Next, the following steps assume, solely for the sake of making it
easy for me to write a simple recipe, that you have copied
pgpverify and the patch for your system to your news server as
/tmp/pgpverify and /tmp/pgpcontrol.pch respectively. I have
tried to format this so that you should be able to cut and paste
any of the lines in italics directly to your shell. (Sorry, the
italics won't show up in the plain text version of this document.
Commands versus comments should still be pretty well obvious.)
+ If you are running INN:
cd to the executable program directory that has ctlinnd.
mv /tmp/pgpverify pgpverify
cd to the root of your INN source tree.
cd site
patch </tmp/pgpcontrol.pch
make install
It has been reported to me that at least one AIX system
has problems with patch not applying the last section of
parsecontrol.pch. If you run AIX, double check it and
apply by manually editing, if necessary.
+ If you are running C News:
cd to the root of the C News executable program directory;
it is the one with the program "spacefor" in it.
mv /tmp/pgpverify pgpverify
cd to the root of your C News source tree.
cd ctl
patch </tmp/pgpcontrol.pch
make install
+ If you are running some other system:
You're out of luck until someone writes a patch and
instructions for your system and makes it available to me
for redistribution.
3. Enable verification for the hierarchies that interest you.
To verify messages, you must have a PGP public key for each signer
that you wish to trust. It should be entered in a key ring that is
accessible to the user-id that runs the news system by running
pgp -ka on a file containing the key to add. For example, at a
site that runs the news server software as news, the following
command run by the news user-id should add the key bounded by
BEGIN and END "PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK" lines in the file /tmp/key
to the default key ring that would be used for authentication:
pgp -ka /tmp/key
As a general policy rule, control message signers will not use their
control message keys to introduce other keys, so when PGP asks you
a question similar to, "Would you trust this user to act as an
introducer and certify other people's public keys to you?" answer
that you would not.
After you have added the appropriate key to your key ring, you
need to tell the news software to validate the control messages
received. As implemented, the system will perform the requested
action if the message can be authenticated and it will mail the
message to the news system administrator if it cannot. Clearly
there are other possible actions that could be implemented, but I
wanted to keep the patches minimal. Future releases of the server
software will probably have increased flexibility.
+ If you are running INN:
Automatic processing of control messages is handled by
control.ctl, which you edit in the same site
subdirectory where you patched parsecontrol. control.ctl
has several lines at the beginning of it that describe the
format of the file, and there is an even longer
control.ctl(5) manual page. To enable PGP verification in
addition to the normal authorization done by control.ctl,
use the action "verify-PGP_USERID" in the fourth field.
For example, if you trust group-admin@isc.org (currently
David Lawrence <tale@isc.org>, aka tale@uunet.uu.net, the
author of this document) to manage groups in the "Big 8"
hierarchies, you could have lines like these (but don't
use the backslash continuation, which I have used here
for readability; keep it all on one line):
newgroup:group-admin@isc.org:\
comp.*|humanities.*|misc.*|news.*|rec.*|sci.*|soc.*|talk.*:\
verify-news.announce.newgroups
rmgroup:group-admin@isc.org:\
comp.*|humanities.*|misc.*|news.*|rec.*|sci.*|soc.*|talk.*:\
verify-news.announce.newgroups
checkgroups:group-admin@isc.org:\
comp.*|humanities.*|misc.*|news.*|rec.*|sci.*|soc.*|talk.*:\
verify-news.announce.newgroups
Additionally, if you like the logging feature available with
the action doit=logfile, you can get the same logging by
using verify-pgp_userid=logfile.
+ If you are running C News:
Automatic processing of control messages is handled by
controlperm, which you edit in the subdirectory where you
patched the control message handling scripts. There is a
controlperm(5) manual page that describes its format. To
enable PGP verification in addition to the normal
authorization done by controlperm, use the action "p" in
the fourth field instead of "y" and add a fifth field for
the pgp_userid.
For example, if you trust group-admin@isc.org (currently
David Lawrence <tale@isc.org>, aka tale@uunet.uu.net, the
author of this document) to manage groups in the "Big 8"
hierarchies, you could have lines like these (but don't
use the backslash continuation, which I have used here for
readability; keep it all on one line):
comp,sci,misc,news,rec,soc,talk group-admin@isc.org nrc pv \
news.announce.newgroups
You could then remove the line that follows the comment,
"but his name can be forged, so don't let him rmgroup..."
+ If you are running D News:
Automatic processing of control messages is handled by
control.conf. To enable PGP verification in addition to
the normal authorization done by control.conf, use the
action "pgp" in the fourth field, in addition to whatever
action you want to happen. For example, if you trust
group-admin@isc.org (currently David Lawrence
<tale@isc.org>, aka tale@uunet.uu.net, the author of this
document) to manage groups in the "Big 8" hierarchies, you
could have lines like these (but don't use the backslash
continuation, which I have used here for readability; keep
it all on one line):
newgroup:group-admin@isc.org:\
comp.*,misc.*,news.*,rec.*,sci.*,soc.*,talk.*:doit,pgp
rmgroup:group-admin@isc.org:\
omp.*,misc.*,news.*,rec.*,sci.*,soc.*,talk.*:doit,pgp
checkgroups:group-admin@isc.org:\
comp.*,misc.*,news.*,rec.*,sci.*,soc.*,talk.*:doit,pgp
Note that there is no provision, with the current D News
implementation, for checking that the signature matches a
particular string, just that it it has a valid signature.
This is probably adequate security as long as you keep the
news user's PGP key ring limited only to people you trust
to maintain newsgroup hierarchies.
Finally, if you have not installed pgp on your system in a
directory where D News normally looks for auxiliary
programs, you will need to add a pointer to it in
dnews.conf, like this:
pgp /path/to/pgp
See http://www.netwinsite.com/pgp.htm for documentation by
the D News authors that might supersede this document.
+ If you are running ANU News (V6.2.0 or later):
Instructions will (hopefully) soon appear here. In the
meantime, consult the "HELP ADD FILE PGP_verification"
server command.
+ If you are running some other system:
You're out of luck until someone writes a patch and
instructions for your system and makes it available to me for
redistribution.
4. Test the system.
Get ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/pgpcontrol/sample.control
and save it to a file on your system; /tmp/sample.control will
be used for this example. You'll use it to make sure things will
work as expected.
To verify the control message, you will need the key for
news.announce.newgroups and authorization in your news system for
group-admin@isc.org to automatically perform "newgroup". Go ahead
and enable it for the test even if you don't want to really allow
this, because it is easy enough to rescind after the test by
editing the control message authorization file and removing the
key with pgp -kr news.announce.newgroups.
You can check that the pgpverify part of the system will work
properly simply by feeding it the sample control message on stdin:
pgpverify < /tmp/sample.control
If if could run pgp and find the correct key in the default key ring,
the string news.announce.newgroups should be printed. The exit
status of the script, found in most shells with the command echo
$? as the next command after pgpverify, should be 0 (zero).
If it doesn't work, then
pgpverify -test < /tmp/sample.control
might give you some enlightment. It will print out the input that is
used for pgp (which is a reconstructed version of the input that
supposedly created the control message) as well as the output of PGP's
analysis of the message. Look especially closely at the latter, since
it can give you important information such as which keyring is being
used.
If it still doesn't work and you've tried and tried to figure out why,
email me at tale@isc.org a complete description of the problem you are
having and how you have tried to remedy it. At a bare minimum, your
mail should include a copy of the message you are trying to verify, a
typescript of the attempted execution of pgpverify -test, and the
output of pgp -kc and pgp -kvc news.announce.newgroups.
When pgpverify passes its test, use the appropriate procedure
below for you news server to verify the authorization system.
+ If you are running INN:
First, cd to the directory where parsecontrol is installed.
Then execute the following four lines, in order, as the user
who owns the news system:
/bin/sh
PROG=newgroup
set -- group-admin@isc.org "" /tmp/sample.control
(. ./parsecontrol "$@"; echo $ACTION)
If the message verified correctly, the echo command should
output doit; otherwise, verification failed and the output
should be mail.
Edit /tmp/sample.control and change all occurences of
"newusers" to "newgroups". Then repeat the parsecontrol
and echo lines. This time verification should fail.
+ If you are running C News:
Because of the way C News is implemented, I have not taken
the trouble to find out how it can be tested without
running through the whole newgroup script. If you are
testing with sample.control, I think this should let you
know whether things will work:
newsflag news.announce.newusers y
newgroup news.announce.newusers moderated </tmp/sample.control
(newsflag is the C News program maint subdirectory; newgroup is
in the ctl subdirectory.)
You should get a mail message telling you that
news.announce.newusers was changed to moderated. If it
didn't appear to work, doublecheck the active file. If it
really didn't work, fix the status of the group with the
following command then let me know about it.
newsflag news.announce.newusers m
If the message did verify correctly, edit /tmp/sample.control
and change all occurences of "newusers" to "newgroups".
Then repeat the newgroup line with an "unmoderated" argument
instead of "moderated"; the argument is unused in the PGP
verification code and doing it this way saves you the effort of
newsflagging things again.
With the changes to sample.control you should now get a
mail message saying, "authentication failed".
When you are all done, make sure news.announce.newusers is
really marked moderated in your active file.
+ If you are running D News:
It appears to me that currently you'll have to wait for a
control message to come in and see whether it does what
you want. If it doesn't, and you can't readily tell why,
contact D News's customer support staff.
+ If you are running ANU News (V6.2.0 or later):
Instructions will (hopefully) soon appear here. In the
meantime, consult the "HELP ADD FILE PGP_verification"
server command.
+ If you are running some other system:
You're out of luck until someone writes a patch and
instructions for your system and makes it available to me for
redistribution.
Format of Signed Control Messages
The format of the input to PGP for signing and verifying
messages is described in a separate document,
ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/pgpcontrol/FORMAT. It is intended for
people who want to implement their own signing and/or verifying
programs instead of using pgpverify or signcontrol.
Frequently Asked Questions
HOW COME THIS PRESUMABLY VALID MESSAGES DOESN'T CHECK OUT WITH PGPVERIFY?
o You don't have the latest version of pgpverify, which
fixed whatever bug is causing authentication of the
message to fail.
o You don't have your PGP configuration files and keyrings
in the default path used by pgp and PGPPATH is not correctly
set in your environment. Either move your PGP directory
to the default location or set the $ENV{'PGPPATH'} line in
pgpverify. (Warning: some INN versions set $HOME to
_PATH_NEWSLIB, so this might be the source of your trouble.)
o You don't have the correct key for the user that signed
it in your key ring.
o You are using a non-English version of pgp, set up with
a "Language = " line in your PGP config.txt file. This
means pgpverify can't find the string it is looking for in
the pgp output. pgpverify tries to overcome a non-English
language specification by setting LANGUAGE in the
environment before calling pgp, but pgp overrides the
runtime environment with the config.txt variables.
o You cut-and-pasted the message in your window system,
which converted the tab characters in the original
message into spaces in the message you are trying to
decode. Having this handled completely correctly by the
signing/verifying code is harder than you might first
think.
o You are running pgpverify on a saved copy of the article
that includes an extraneous trailing newline, such
as might be inserted by saving the message from a mail
handler or news reader, that was not present in the
original message.
o You cut-and-pasted the sample INN control.ctl lines above
and left the continuation lines in, instead of joining
each group of three physical lines comprising one logical
line to just one physical line.
_____________________________________________________________
Signing Control Messages
If you are responsible for sending control messages about
authorized changes to a newsgroup hierarchy, then
ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/pgpcontrol/signcontrol
will sign your control messages so that pgpverify can
authenticate them. It is a Perl script that requires Perl
version 5 or higher to work. It has several configuration
parameters that should be reviewed before use.
When establishing a PGP key and control message sender, please use
tokens that are not tied to a particular individual. This makes it
easier to transfer the administrative responsibility when it
finally comes time. (The all-too-common "tale@uunet.uu.net" sender
is still used for control messages because of its legacy in the
installed server base; I would prefer to use
newgroups-request@uunet.uu.net.) Please also do not sign other
keys with the key that is used for control messages.
Note that the key you use should not include whitespace or angle
brackets, because some of the various pieces of software that deal
with the user id mishandle it. For the best results netwide, I
strongly recommend that you use only alphanumeric characters, the at
sign, dot, dash, plus and underscore.
If you will be signing control messages, please let me know the
hierarchy that you are responsible for maintaining and the
information that you would like to appear in the List of PGP
Public Keys for Newsgroup Administration.
_____________________________________________________________
How to Get PGP
Information about obtaining PGP can be found in the Where to get the
latest PGP FAQ article, posted regularly in the alt.security.pgp
newsgroup.
How to Get Perl
Information about obtaining Perl can be found in the comp.lang.perl.*
FAQ 1/5 - Availability article, posted regularly in the
comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup.
_____________________________________________________________
Last modified: 13 Apr 2001
David C Lawrence
tale@isc.org