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by brabel 1679 days ago
It's a hell of a lot harder to squat namespaces as you need to either spoof or steal or buy one domain per namespace, which is not trivial.

Maven Central has require PGP signatures since the beginning as far as I know! In the olden days, it didn't use HTTPS though (which has been fixed for several years now), so unless you validated the signatures and kept track of the PGP keys, you could still run into trouble.

1 comments

> It's a hell of a lot harder to squat namespaces as you need to either spoof or steal or buy one domain per namespace, which is not trivial.

This introduces a different security wrinkle, as domain names need to be continually renewed. What does Maven do to prevent unauthorized transfer of namespace ownership when a domain lapses?

That seems to be a very unusual case, but because Maven uses PGP keys, the domain owner would need to ALSO transfer their own PGP keys to the new domain owner, otherwise lib consumers wouldn't automatically (at least) trust their releases under that domain name.