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.
Earlier on in the stubbing of this package we realized that it wasn't
going to be possible to populate the authentication-related bits for all
packages because the relevant metadata just isn't available for packages
that are already local.
However, we just moved ahead with that awkward design at the time because
we needed to get other work done, and so we've been mostly producing
PackageMeta values with all-zeros hashes and just ignoring them entirely
as a temporary workaround.
This is a first step towards what is hopefully a more intuitive model:
authentication is an optional thing in a PackageMeta that is currently
populated only for packages coming from a registry.
So far this still just models checking a SHA256 hash, which is not a
sufficient set of checks for a real release but hopefully the "real"
implementation is a natural iteration of this starting point, and if not
then at least this interim step is a bit more honest about the fact that
Authentication will not be populated on every PackageMeta.
Although we tend to return these in contexts where at least one of these
values is implied, being explicit means that PackageMeta values are
self-contained and less reliant on such external context.
This is a temporary helper so that we can potentially ship the new
provider installer without making a breaking change by relying on the
old default namespace lookup API on the default registry to find a proper
FQN for a legacy provider provider address during installation.
If it's given a non-legacy provider address then it just returns the given
address verbatim, so any codepath using it will also correctly handle
explicit full provider addresses. This also means it will automatically
self-disable once we stop using addrs.NewLegacyProvider in the config
loader, because there will therefore no longer be any legacy provider
addresses in the config to resolve. (They'll be "default" provider
addresses instead, assumed to be under registry.terraform.io/hashicorp/* )
It's not decided yet whether we will actually introduce the new provider
in a minor release, but even if we don't this API function will likely be
useful for a hypothetical automatic upgrade tool to introduce explicit
full provider addresses into existing modules that currently rely on
the equivalent to this lookup in the current provider installer.
This is dead code for now, but my intent is that it would either be called
as part of new provider installation to produce an address suitable to
pass to Source.AvailableVersions, or it would be called from the
aforementioned hypothetical upgrade tool.
Whatever happens, these functions can be removed no later than one whole
major release after the new provider installer is introduced, when
everyone's had the opportunity to update their legacy unqualified
addresses.
Registries backed by static files are likely to use relative paths to
their archives for simplicity's sake, but we'll normalize them to be
absolute before returning because the caller wouldn't otherwise know what
to resolve the URLs relative to.
We intend to support installation both directly from origin registries and
from mirrors in the local filesystem or over the network. This Source
interface will serve as our abstraction over those three options, allowing
calling code to treat them all the same.
Our existing provider installer was originally built to work with
releases.hashicorp.com and later retrofitted to talk to the official
Terraform Registry. It also assumes a flat namespace of providers.
We're starting a new one here, copying and adapting code from the old one
as necessary, so that we can build out this new API while retaining all
of the existing functionality and then cut over to this new implementation
in a later step.
Here we're creating a foundational component for the new installer, which
is a mechanism to query for the available versions and download locations
of a particular provider.
Subsequent commits in this package will introduce other Source
implementations for installing from network and filesystem mirrors.
Alisdair McDiarmid