[anonymous-panda]

That’s not an effective idea for the same reason that lines of code is not a good measure of productivity. It’s an easy measure to automate but it’s purely performative as it doesn’t score the qualitative value of any of the maintenance work. At best it encourages you to use only popular projects which is its own danger (software monoculture is cheaper to attack) without actually resolving the danger - this attack is reasonably sophisticated and underhanded that could be slipped through almost any code review.

One real issue is that xz’s build system is so complicated that it’s possible to slip things in which is an indication that the traditional autoconf Linux build mechanism needs to be retired and banned from distros.

But even that’s not enough because an attack only needs to succeed once. The advice to minimize your dependencies is an impractical one in a lot of cases (clearly) and not in your full control as you may acquire a surprising dependency due to transitiveness. And updating your dependencies is a best practice which in this case actually introduces the problem.

We need to focus on real ways to improve the supply chain. eg having repeatable idempotent builds with signed chain of trusts that are backed by real identities that can be prosecuted and burned. For example, it would be pretty effective counter incentive for talent if we could permanently ban this person from ever working on lots of projects. That’s typically how humans deal with members of a community who misbehave and we don’t have a good digital equivalent for software development. Of course that’s also dangerous as blackball environments tend to become weaponized.

[kbenson]

> We need to focus on real ways to improve the supply chain. eg having repeatable idempotent builds with signed chain of trusts that are backed by real identities that can be prosecuted and burned.

So, either no open source development because nobody will vouch to that degree for others, or absolutely no anonymity and you'll have to worry about anything you provide because of you screw up and introduce a RCE all of a sudden you'll have a bunch of people and companies looking to say it was on purpose so they don't have to own up to any of their own poor practices that allowed it to actually be executed on?

[anonymous-panda]

You don’t need vouching for anyone. mDL is going to be a mechanism to have a government authority vouch your identity. Of course a state actor like this can forge the identity, but that forgery at least will give a starting point for the investigation to try to figure out who this individual is. There’s other technical questions about how you verify that the identity really is tied in some real way to the user at the other end (eg not a stolen identity) but there are things coming down that will help with that (ie authenticated chains of trust for hw that can attest the identity was signed on the given key in person and you require that attestation).

As for people accusing you of an intentional RCE, that may be a hypothetical scenario but I doubt it’s very real. Most people have a very long history of good contributions and therefore have built up a reputation that would be compared against the reality on the ground. No one is accusing Lasse Collin of participating in this even though arguably it could have been him all along for what anyone knows.

It doesn’t need to be perfect but directionally it probably helps more than it hurts.

All that being said, this clearly seems like a state actor which changes the calculus for any attempts like this since the funding and power is completely different than what most people have access to and likely we don’t have any really good countermeasures here beyond making it harder for obfuscated code to make it into repositories.