Comment by simonw
6 hours ago
PyPI does exactly that, and it's been very effective. Security partners can scan packages and use the invite-only API to report them: https://blog.pypi.org/posts/2024-03-06-malware-reporting-evo...
6 hours ago
PyPI does exactly that, and it's been very effective. Security partners can scan packages and use the invite-only API to report them: https://blog.pypi.org/posts/2024-03-06-malware-reporting-evo...
PyPI is pretty best-in-class here and I think that they should be seen as the example for others to pursue.
The client side tooling needs work, but that's a major effort in and of itself.
It is not effective if it just takes a simple base64 encode to bypass. If Claude is trivially able to find that it is malicious then Pypi is being negligent.
The package in question was live for 46 minutes. It generally takes longer than that for security partners to scan and flag packages.
PyPI doesn't block package uploads awaiting security scanning - that would be a bad idea for a number of reasons, most notably (in my opinion) that it would be making promises that PyPI couldn't keep and lull people into a false sense of security.
I realize this is controversial (and many Python folks would claim anti ethical). But I keep wondering if requiring a small payment for registering and updating packages would help. The money could go to maintaining pypix as well as automated AI analysis. Folks who really couldn't afford it could apply for sponsorship.
3 replies →
It should not let people download unscanned dependencies without a warning and asking the user to override and use a potentially insecure package. If such security bug is critical enough to need to bypass this time (spoiler: realistically it is not actually that bad for a security fix to be delayed) they can work with the pypi security team to do a quicker manual review of the change.
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Would you happen to know where the latency comes from between upload and scanning? Would more resources for more security scanner runners to consume the scanner queue faster solve this? Trying to understand if there are inherent process limitations or if a donation for this compute would solve this gap.
(software supply chain security is a component of my work)
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Thanks, TIL.