It's 2015!! Why do massive projects like LibreOffice not have their package downloads and updates over https?
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Because it doesn't do any good to serve over SSL. They do provided GPG signatures and checksums which provide assurance that the bits you wanted are the bits you got. Ex. http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/4.4.0...
What is good (and often overlooked) about package updates over HTTPS is that you don't leak metadata about which packages you are updating or installing. Not a big issue with an office suite but still it's an option I would prefer.
Sorry, but such a strong claim requires more justification. From what I know, it is orders of magnitude harder to hijack a package download over HTTPS than over HTTP.
It is technically feasible for me to sit in a random coffee shop and do a drive-by infection of .exe files downloaded via HTTP by arbitrary other people on the same WLAN. The same is not true for HTTPS, because I am not able to forge arbitrary SSL certificates.
Yes, there are problems with SSL, but to claim that "it doesn't do any good" seems wrong.
How good the signatures are if they are served from HTTP as well? It only serves as an integrity check, but it still won't guard you from a malicious person putting a virus into the package and adjusting the signatures.
If you're validating the signatures properly, then it's impossible for a malicious attacker to adjust the signatures in a way that they will still validate.
However, validating the signature properly involves you being certain of using the correct public key. This is the tricky part. Being in the PGP strong set helps with this. Using HTTPS gives you some confidence, but no protection against server compromise.
Once you do have the correct public key, however, you can be protected against server compromise for all future releases, too.
Or, at the least, you can verify that future releases are coming unmodified from the same origin.
That won't work though, only the person who posses the private key can produce a valid GPG signature.
Because it's slower, more compute intensive and unnecessary?
Routinely using SSL even when it's "unnecessary" makes life harder on the NSA, which is all the justification I need.
NSA can figure out the traffic from donate.libreoffice.org (or wherever; I can't see where the downloads are coming from right now because their website isn't loading for me) is not worth of decrypting based on the hostname passed in the clear via SNI. Unless libreoffice makes a habit of also hosting interesting content on their site too.
According to Google [1][2], the overhead is negligible.
[1] https://www.imperialviolet.org/2010/06/25/overclocking-ssl.h...
[2] http://blog.codinghorror.com/should-all-web-traffic-be-encry...