Comment by charcircuit
9 hours ago
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.
sadly I still worry about that. An install fails once, you you hard code the --force flag in all your CI/CD jobs and we are back in the same place again. I am not sure what the answer is, though problems...
I don't understand why this would be an issue. Firstly, you could just pin your dependencies, but even if you don't, couldn't the default behaviour be to just install the newest scanned version?
Adding a hardcoded flag is not the same as asking the user if they want potential malware. If CI/CD is broken they should revert the change to pinned dependencies instead of trying to install a bleeding edge version of a new dependency that hasn't been scanned yet.
What happens then if the security scanners say something is safe and it turns out not to be?
I don't think PyPI should be in the business of saying if a piece of software is safe to install or not.
Then it will be downloadable and then it's up to your own security scanners to catch it. If you find it, it should be reported to pypi and then the scanner should be improved to catch that kind of bypass the next time it comes around. In such a world I don't think pypi is acting negligent.
That's really not very different from what we have right now. PyPI works with scanners which catch a whole lot of malware and are getting better all the time.
I think PyPI suggesting that software is safe would be a step down from this because it make promises that PyPI can't keep, and would encourage a false sense of security.
1 reply →