I'm happy to announce the first version of stackage-upload. Copied below is the content of the README file; if you see errors please send a pull request to update the content. This tool is pretty simple right now, but can be easily extended. If others are interested in collaborating on this project, please be in touch.

stackage-upload provides a more secure version of the cabal upload command by using HTTPS. When uploading a package to Hackage, cabal upload will perform the upload in plain-text via unencrypted HTTP, using basic authentication, which is vulnerable to both man in the middle (MITM) and eavesdropping attacks (anyone sniffing your packets can get your username and password). This package instead uses secure HTTPS to upload to avoid both of these attacks.

To install, simply run cabal update && cabal install stackage-upload . Usage is quite similar to cabal upload : just call stackage-upload and pass in a list of tarballs to upload. (If you have stackage-cli installed, you can call stk upload instead.) stackage-upload --help will provide full options.

Why not fix cabal?

I'd be happy to add TLS support to cabal-install directly (using Vincent's tls package), but the two last times this topic came up, I have been unable to find a proposal that is acceptable to the Cabal project (mostly around Haskell Platform requirements). I made an open offer to send the pull request myself to move cabal-install over to http-client to get TLS support (either via http-client-tls or http-client-openssl).

Why Stackage?

See the same question and its answer on stackage-update.

Future enhancements

Store passwords securely via GPG encryption

Upload documentation to Hackage (work around the sometimes-broken doc builder)

Perform pre-upload checks, such as running the test suite from the tarball to check for missing files

History

This tool was something that I (Michael Snoyman) wrote for myself a while back, and decided to rebrand as stackage-upload when the severity of the insecure upload situation became apparent to me, and it became obvious that there was no path forward for getting cabal-install fixed.

I actually consider this situation to be so dangerous that I would like to ask the Hackage Server team to consider turning off insecure uploads to Hackage. The current possibility for corrupted uploads to infect all users of a package is alarmingly high.

Do you like this blog post and need help with DevOps, Rust or functional programming? Contact us.

Share this