Providers installed from the registry are accompanied by a list of
checksums (the "SHA256SUMS" file), which is cryptographically signed to
allow package authentication. The process of verifying this has multiple
steps:
- First we must verify that the SHA256 hash of the package archive
matches the expected hash. This could be done for local installations
too, in the future.
- Next we ensure that the expected hash returned as part of the registry
API response matches an entry in the checksum list.
- Finally we verify the cryptographic signature of the checksum list,
using the public keys provided by the registry.
Each of these steps is implemented as a separate PackageAuthentication
type. The local archive installation mechanism uses only the archive
checksum authenticator, and the HTTP installation uses all three in the
order given.
The package authentication system now also returns a result value, which
is used by command/init to display the result of the authentication
process.
There are three tiers of signature, each of which is presented
differently to the user:
- Signatures from the embedded HashiCorp public key indicate that the
provider is officially supported by HashiCorp;
- If the signing key is not from HashiCorp, it may have an associated
trust signature, which indicates that the provider is from one of
HashiCorp's trusted partners;
- Otherwise, if the signature is valid, this is a community provider.
Historically our logic to handle discovering and installing providers has
been spread across several different packages. This package is intended
to become the home of all logic related to what is now called "provider
cache directories", which means directories on local disk where Terraform
caches providers in a form that is ready to run.
That includes both logic related to interrogating items already in a cache
(included in this commit) and logic related to inserting new items into
the cache from upstream provider sources (to follow in later commits).
These new codepaths are focused on providers and do not include other
plugin types (provisioners and credentials helpers), because providers are
the only plugin type that is represented by a heirarchical, decentralized
namespace and the only plugin type that has an auto-installation protocol
defined. The existing codepaths will remain to support the handling of
the other plugin types that require manual installation and that use only
a flat, locally-defined namespace.
Alisdair McDiarmid