Package

Are you sure that your package is safe from corruption or malicious activity? Learn how signature verification can help determine this.

Large and popular RPM repositories are typically replicated around the world. The projects and companies providing the packages utilize content distribution networks (CDNs) and mirror sites to make their packages available to consumers. For many open-source projects, that includes hosting by volunteers. To detect and avoid malicious replacement packages, package owners can sign the package files, and consumers can verify those signatures.

While GPG can sign any file, manually checking package signatures is not scalable for system administrators. The RPM format has an area specifically reserved to hold a signature of the header and payload. The rpm utility uses GPG keys to sign packages and its own collection of imported public keys to verify the packages. YUM and DNF use repository configuration files to provide pointers to the GPG public key locations and assist in importing the keys so that RPM can verify the packages.