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218 points miketheman | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.201s | source
1. trishankkarthik ◴[] No.42137079[source]
Very cool, and congrats!

The corresponding ToB blog post says the following:

> Longer term, we can do even better: doing “one off” verifications means that the client has no recollection of which identities should be trusted for which distributions. To address this, installation tools need a notion of “trust on first use” for signing identities, meaning that subsequent installations can be halted and inspected by a user if the attesting identity changes (or the package becomes unattested between versions).

Agree: signing is only as good as verification. However, trust-on-first-use (TOFU) is not the most secure way to map packages to attestations because nothing stops attackers who have taken over PyPI from tampering with the _unsigned_ mapping of identities to attestations in package lockfiles for new clients (certainly in containerized environments where everything could look new), and even just new versions of packages.

Although [PEP 458](https://peps.python.org/pep-0458/) is about signing the Python package index, it sets the foundation for being able to securely map packages to signed in-toto _policies_, which would in turn securely map identities to attestations. I think it is worth noting how these different PEPs can work together :)