Have a trusted mirror pool

boyska
2026-04-23T07:24:25Z

Right now, our mirror pool is untrusted.

One approach for that is #20753+ where we do some vetting to gain more trust in mirror operators. Another approach is to handle downloads from our own servers: that's https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/tails-sysadmin/-/issues/18153 and removing all other mirrors from the pool.

It would:

close #20569

close #16905

simplify UX: user wouldn't need to verify downloads at all, which is one step less

probably speed up RM work: we could push changes to the mirror instead of waiting for a (less efficient) pull to happen, which could decrease the lead time for releases

Next steps:

Evaluate bandwidth needs: sysadmins will need this info

Decide whether we want to move all downloads (IMG+ISO+IUK) to such a pool, or only the downloads which typically happen in a browser (IMG+ISO). That's a chicken-and-egg with previous step.