The point the author is making is that at least your third-party plugins should be protected from tampering in transit.<p>Don&#x27;t think this is only restricted to state-level actors. With even commercial routers like Cisco and Juniper shipping with backdoors, and of course personal routers with vulnerabilities all over the place, it&#x27;s not an especially heavy lift to take over a bunch of last-mile routers.<p>There are tons of these unprotected attack vectors, and the author is right that we need to start rooting each one out. It all starts with your OS&#x27;s keys (or below your OS, in UEFI!)<p>This is probably even more of an issue for Linux distros that serve their initial install CD&#x27;s (or bittorrent links) over HTTP. That&#x27;s an easy vector for a third party to slip in a replacement CD&#x2F;DVD and checksums, or even just slipstream in the changes without bothering with the checksums, since probably most people never check the digests and if they did and they didn&#x27;t match, they&#x27;d just figure it was a bad download and never suspect a thing.<p>When people say &quot;oh, no one cares about me&quot;, it&#x27;s simply not true. That&#x27;s why there&#x27;s &gt; million viruses out there. That&#x27;s why ransomware exist. Oh, yes. they care.