A Framework for Securing Software Update Systems
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TUF (The Update Framework) helps developers secure their new or existing
software update systems. Software update systems are vulnerable to many known
attacks, including those that can result in clients being compromised or crashed.
TUF helps solve this problem by providing a flexible security framework that can
be added to software updaters.


What Is a Software Update System?
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Generally, a software update system is an application (or part of an application)
running on a client system that obtains and installs software. This can include
updates to software that is already installed or even completely new software.

Three major classes of software update systems are:

Application Updaters - which are used by applications use to update themselves.
For example, Firefox updates itself through its own application updater.

Library Package Managers - such as those offered by many programming languages
for installing additional libraries. These are systems such as Python's
pip/easy_install + PyPI, Perl's CPAN, Ruby's Gems, and PHP's PEAR.

System Package Managers - used by operating systems to update and install all of
the software on a client system. Debian's APT, Red Hat's YUM, and openSUSE's
YaST are examples of these.


Our Approach
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There are literally thousands of different software update systems in common use
today. (In fact the average Windows user has about  two dozen different software
updaters on their machine!)

We are building a library that can be universally (and in most cases transparently)
used to secure software update systems.