[woodruffw]

The basic issue with manual interaction is a question of authority: a pretty common problem for companies (and open source groups) is when $EARLY_EMPLOYEE/$EARLY_CONTRIBUTOR creates and owns the entire publishing process for a key package, and then leaves without performing a proper transfer of responsibility. This essentially locks the company/group out of its own work, and increases support load on community maintained indices to essentially adjudicate rightful ownership of the package name.

(There are a variety of ways to solve this, but the one I like best is automated publishing a la Trusted Publishing with environment mediated manual signoffs. GitHub and other CI/CD providers enable this.)

[mbreese]

I don’t buy this. I mean, I’m sympathetic to the issue. It’s easy for things to get jumbled when companies are young. But we’re talking about libraries that are used by your customers. To many, this is the externally visible interface to the company.

What you describe sounds like a process problem to me. If an $EARLY_EMPLOYEE if the only one with the deploy keys for what is a product of the company, then that’s a problem. If a deployment of that key library can be made without anyone approving it, that’s also a problem. But those are both people problems… and you can’t solve a people problem with a technical solution.

[woodruffw]

> But those are both people problems… and you can’t solve a people problem with a technical solution.

I don’t think it is a people problem in this case: the only reason there’s a person involved at all is because we’ve decided to introduce one as an intermediating party. A more misuse-resistant scheme disintermediates the human, because the human was never actually a mandatory part of the scheme.

[mbreese]

What person do you want to remove from the process?

[woodruffw]

The person who intermediates the trust relationship between the index and the source repository. There’s no reason for the credential that links those two parties to be intermediated by a human; they’re two machine services talking.

(You obviously can’t disintermediate the human from maintenance or development!)

[mbreese]

But that’s the person I think is mandatory.

You’re saying that whatever is in the source repository should be uploaded in the npm index, right? If the code is tagged as release, the built artifact is automatically uploaded to npm. Is that what you’re proposing?

That exactly what got PostHog into this position. The keys to publish to npm were available to an engineer or GitHub to push a malware build into npm automatically. This isn’t a technical issue… it’s a process issue. I don’t see the problem as that the keys were misused. I see the problem as that it was possible to misuse the keys at all. Why do you need that process to be automatic? How often are you pushing new updates?

I would argue that those npm assets/libraries are your work product. That is what your customer needs to use your service. It is a published product from your company. It is too important to allow a new version to be published out to the public without a human in the loop to approve it.

When you have a fully automatic publishing cycle, you’re trading security for convenience. It’s all about how much risk you’re willing to accept. For me, that’s too much of a risk to the reputation to the company. I also think the balance shifts if you’re talking about purely internal assets, having completely automatic ci/cd makes perfect sense for most companies. For me, it is about who is hurt if there is an issue (and you should expect for there to be an issue).

Putting a person in the loop for releasing a product is one way to solve this. It’s not perfect, but at the moment, I think it’s the most secure (for the public).

[woodruffw]

> You’re saying that whatever is in the source repository should be uploaded in the npm index, right? If the code is tagged as release, the built artifact is automatically uploaded to npm. Is that what you’re proposing?

No, I'm saying that the source repository should act as an authentication principal itself. A human should still initiate the release process, but the authentication process that connects the source repository (more precisely CI/CD) to the index should not involve a credential that's implicitly bound to a human identity (because the human's role within a project or company is ephemeral).

As far as I can tell, what got PostHog into this situation wasn't a fully automated release process (very few companies/groups have fully automated processes), but the fact that they had user-created long-lived credentials that an attacker could store and weaponize at a time most convenient to them. That's a problem regardless of whether there's normally a human in the loop or not, because the long-lived credential itself was sufficient for publishing.

(In other words, we basically agree about human approval being good; what I'm saying is that we should formalize human approval without making the authentication scheme explicitly require an intermediating partner who doesn't inherently represent the actual principal, i.e. the source repository.)