alt Hacker NewsWhat we need is accountability and ties to real-world identity.
If you're compromised, you're burned forever in the ledger. It's the only way a trust model can work.
The threat of being forever tainted is enough to make people more cautious, and attackers will have no way to pull off attacks unless they steal identities of powerful nodes.
Like, it shouldn't be a thing that some large open-source project has some 4th layer nested dependency made by some anonymous developer with 10 stars on Github.
If instead, the dependency chain had to be tied to real verified actors, you know there's something at stake for them to be malicious. It makes attacks much less likely. There's repercussions, reputation damage, etc.
Replies
> What we need is accountability and ties to real-world identity.
Who's gonna enforce that?
> If you're compromised, you're burned forever in the ledger.
Guess we can't use XZ utils anymore cause Lasse Collin got pwned.
Also can't use Chalk, debug, ansi-styles, strip-ansi, supports-color, color-convert and others due to Josh Junon also ending up a victim.
Same with ua-parser-js and Faisal Salman.
Same with event-stream and Dominic Tarr.
Same with the 2018 ESLint hack.
Same with everyone affected by Shai-Hulud.
Hell, at that point some might go out of their way to get people they don't like burned.
At the same time, I think that stopping reliance on package managers that move fast and break things and instead making OS maintainers review every package and include them in distros would make more sense. Of course, that might also be absolutely insane (that's how you get an ecosystem that's from 2 months to 2 years behind the upstream packages) and take 10x more work, but with all of these compromises, I'd probably take that and old packages with security patches, instead of pulling random shit with npm or pip or whatever.
Though having some sort of a ledger of bad actors (instead of people who just fuck up) might also be nice, if a bit impossible to create - because in the current day world that's potentially every person that you don't know and can't validate is actually sending you patches (instead of someone impersonating them), or anyone with motivations that aren't clear to you, especially in the case of various "helpful" Jia Tans.
> real-world identity
This bit sounds like dystopian governance, antithetical to most open source philosophies.
There is no need of that bullshit. Guix can just set an isolated container in seconds not touching your $HOME at all and importing all the Python/NPM/Whatever dependencies in the spot.
> The threat of being forever tainted is enough to make people more cautious
No it's not. The blame game was very popular in the Eastern Block and it resulted in a stagnant society where lots of things went wrong anyway. For instance, Chernobyl.