alt Hacker NewsThere's an easy way to stop most supply chain attacks:
1. Publishing users must approve each and every release from a smartphone app.
2. Publishing users must provide verified government ID.
The first step prevents the types of attacks where an attacker gets control of a maintainer's computer and publishes a new release.
The second step discourages attacks where a user tries to get a malicious package used by others.
When combined with the security features that already exist, e.g. delays and automatic scanning, it would make it considerably harder to pull off a successful attack.
Issue is this is such a pain (and shuts out a large percentage of the world population) that you'll inevitably get a parallel ecosystem of packages without these onerous controls that everyone would end up using.
I don't know how to square the circle but any variation of "make it safer but really painful and difficult for anyone to publish a package" has this problem