Comment by westurner
1 year ago
pip checks that a given was signed with the pypi key but does not check for a signature from the publisher. And now there's no way to host any type of cryptographic signatures on pypi.
There is no e2e: pypi signs what's uploaded.
(Noting also that packages don't have to be encrypted in order to have cryptographic signatures; only the signature is encrypted, not the whole package)
Yeah the whole thing looks like throwing away baby with bathwater; the package should
* get a signature for author ("the actual author published it") + some metadata with list of valid signing keys (in case project have more authors or just for key rotation * get a signature for hosting provider that confirms "yes, that actual user logged in and uploaded the package" * (the hardest part) key management on client side so the user have to do least amount of work possible in when downloading/updating valid package.
If user doesn't want to go to effort to validate whether the public key of author is valid so be it but at very least system should alert on tampering with the provider (checking the hosting signature) or the author key changing (compromised credentials to the hosting provider).
It still doesn't prevent "the attacker steals key off author's machine" but that is by FAR the rarest case and could be pretty reasonably prevented by just using hardware tokens. Hell, fund them for key contributors.