Comment by woodruffw
8 hours ago
(2) is addressed by Sigstore having its own infrastructure and a full-time rotation staff. PyPI doesn't need to run or operationalize anything, which is a significant relief compared to the prospect of having to operationalize a PGP keyserver with volunteer staffing.
(I'm intentionally glossing over details here, like the fact that PyPI doesn't need to perform any online operations to validate Sigstore's signatures. The bottom line is that everything about it is operationally simpler and more modern than could be shaped out of the primitives PGP offers.)
(4) could be done with PGP, but would go against the long-standing pattern of "sign the file" that most PGP tooling is ossified around. It also doesn't change the fact that PGP's signing defaults aren't great, that there's a huge tail of junk signing keys out there, and that to address those problems PyPI would need to be in the business of parsing PGP packets during package upload. That's just not a good use of anybody's time.
> having its own infrastructure
This seems like a different brand of the keyserver network?
> PyPI doesn't need to run or operationalize anything
So it's not a new operational dependency because it's index metadata? That seems more like an implementation detail (aside from the imagined PGP keyserver dependency) that seems accommodatable given either system.
> like the fact that PyPI doesn't need to perform any online operations to validate Sigstore's signatures
I may be missing something subtle (or glaring) but "online operations" would be interactions with some other service or a non-PSF service? Or simply a service not-wholly-pypi? Regardless, the index seems like it must be a "verifier" for design consideration (2) from PEP 740 to hold, which would mean that the index must perform the verification step on the uploaded data--which seems inconsequentially different between an imagined PGP system (other than it would have to access the imagined PyPI keyserver) and sigstore/in-toto.
> ... PyPI would need to be in the business of parsing PGP packets during package upload.
But the sigstore analog is the JSON array of in-toto attestation statement objects.