How to compare programs to .deb files?

Extracted from debian-list
Tip provided by Ben Collins
> Is there an option to dpkg (or it's friends) to verify that what's
> currently installed is the same as what should be installed?  In other
> words, if random cracker person decides to break into my system and
> change login, ls, and ps, can I compare from a .deb file that those
> programs are correct or not (using md5 checksums or some such)?
>
> I don't acutally suspect my system was broken into, but a friend of
> mine was as such and I want to be prepared.

There is the debsums package which checks the packages files against the
md5sum list that came with it. There is also a program with debsums that
will generate the md5sum list for packages that didn't come with one. IMHO
i think that packages should be required to come with md5sums but this is
not the case right now. You can also look at /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.md5sums.

Follow-up : (1)  
| Previous | Next | Index of category | Main Index | Submit |


Appears in section(s) : security
Tip recorded : 18-11-1998 23:54:32
HTML page last changed : 27-07-1999 20:06:03