[Distutils] vetting, signing, verification of release files

[Trishank Karthik Kuppusamy]

On 07/18/2013 03:24 AM, Ronald Oussoren wrote:
> I'm trying to understand what this means for package maintainers. If I understand you correctly maintainers would upload packages just like they do now, and packages are then automaticly signed by the "unstable" role.  Then some manual process by the PyPI maintainers can sign a package with a stable row. Is that correct? If it is, how is this supposed to scale? The contents of PyPI is currently not vetted at all, and it seems to me that manually vetting uploads for even the most popular packages would be a significant amount of work that would have to be done by what's likely a small set of volunteers.

I think Daniel put it best when he said that we have been focusing too 
much on deciding whether or not a package is malicious. As he said, it 
is important that any security proposal must limit what targeted attacks 
on the PyPI infrastructure can do.

You are right that asking people to vet through packages for inclusion 
into the stable role would be generally unscalable. I think the best way 
to think about it is that we can mostly decide a "stable" set of 
packages with a simple rule, and then *choose* to interfere (if 
necessary) with decisions on which packages go in or out of the stable 
role. The stable role simply has to sign this automatically computed set 
of "stable" packages every now and then, so that the impacts of attacks 
on the PyPI infrastructure are limited. Users who install the same set 
of stable packages will see the installation of the same set of intended 
packages.

Presently, I use a simple heuristic to compute a nominal set of stable 
packages: all files older than 3 months are considered to be "stable". 
There is no consideration of whether a package is malicious here; just 
that it has not changed long enough to be considered mature.

> Also, what are you supposed to do when FooBar 2.0 is signed by the stable role and FooBar 2.0.1 is only signed by the unstable role, and you try to fetch FooBar 2.0.* (that is, 2.0 or any 2.0.x point release)?
>

In this case, I expect that since we have asked pip to install FooBar 
2.0.*, it will first fetch the /simple/FooBar/ PyPI metadata (distinct 
from TUF metadata) to see what versions of the FooBar package are 
available. If FooBar 2.0.1 was recently added, then the latest version 
of the /simple/FooBar/ metadata would have been signed for the unstable 
role. There are two cases for the stable role:

1. The stable role has also signed for the FooBar 2.0.1 package. In this 
case, pip would find FooBar 2.0.1 and install it.
2. The stable role has not yet signed for the FooBar 2.0.1 package. In 
this case, pip would find FooBar 2.0 and install it.

Why would this happen? In this case, we have specified in the TUF 
metadata that if the same file (in this case, the /simple/FooBar/ HTML 
file) has been signed for by both the stable and unstable roles, then 
the client must prefer the version from the stable role.

Of course, there are questions about timeliness. Sometimes users want 
the latest packages, or the developers of the packages themselves may 
want this to be the case. For the purposes of bootstrapping PyPI with 
TUF, we have presently decided to simplify key management and allow for 
the protection of some valuable packages on PyPI (with limited 
timeliness trade-off) while allowing for the majority of the packages to 
be continuously released.

There are a few ways to ensure that the latest intended versions of the 
FooBar package will be installed:
1. Do not nominate FooBar into the "stable" set of packages, which 
should ideally be reserved --- for initial bootstrapping purposes at 
least --- for perhaps what the community thinks are the "canonical" 
packages that must initially be protected from attacks.
2. The stable role may delegate its responsibility about information on 
the FooBar package to the FooBar package developers themselves.
3. Explore different rules (other than just ordering roles by trust) to 
balance key management, timeliness and other issues without 
significantly sacrificing security.

We welcome your thoughts here. For the moment, we are planning to wrap 
up as soon as possible our experiments on how PyPI+pip perform with and 
without TUF with this particular scheme of stable and unstable roles.