[Distutils] Malicious packages on PyPI

[Donald Stufft]

> On Jun 1, 2017, at 6:20 PM, Jannis Gebauer <ja.geb at me.com> wrote:
> 
>> This makes me remember https://hackernoon.com/building-a-botnet-on-pypi-be1ad280b8d6 <https://hackernoon.com/building-a-botnet-on-pypi-be1ad280b8d6> on a related note.
> 
> 
> Yep, that’s basically the same thing. Instead of using package names of builtins, the attacker is using a combination of popular apt/yum packages with a mix of package names with typos.
> 
> During development, it’s not uncommon to make mistakes like:
> 
> pip install requirements.txt (forgot the -r)
> pip install requestd (typo)
> pip install tkinter (not registered)
> 
> Or to use the wrong package manager (apt-get install python-dev vs. pip install python-dev). 
> 
> I wonder if it would make sense to build some kind of blacklist for this. According to the blog post there were close to 10k installs over a period of just three days. I believe Debian is running some kind of popularity contest for their packages which could be used to identify problematic packages. This will be a lot of manual work, but I’d work on a list like this.
> 
> 


Folks have suggested mining the logs from PyPI looking for 404 results on ``/simple/`` to highlight common packages that are being installed which don’t yet exist, then using that data to inform a sort of automatic blacklist for new project names.

Other folks have suggested that trying to use some sort of algorithm with existing names to figure out common typos is a solution.

Ultimately the thing that’s missing is someone to spend the time to figure out a good solution and implement it. I will get to it eventually, but if someone feels enthused to make it happen sooner, then their contribution would be appreciated.

—
Donald Stufft



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