I don't have much experience with GitHub's CI offering. But if this is an accurate description of the steps you need to take to use it securely ... then I don't think it can, in fact, ever be used securely.
Even if you trust Microsoft's cloud engineering on the backend, this is a system that does not appear to follow even the most basic principles of privilege and isolation? I'm not sure why you would even try to build "supply-chain security" on top of this.
I would agree with this. I recently tried to figure out how to properly secure agent-authored code in GitHub Actions. I believe I succeeded in doing this[1] but the secure configuration ended up being so delicate that I don’t have high hopes of this being a scalable path.
Now, as other commenter pointed out, maybe this is just inherent complexity in this space. But more secure defaults could go a long way making this more secure in practice.
Out of curiosity, is there a build setup you have seen in the past that you think could be a good replacement for this complex GitHub CI setup? Asking for a friend ;)
Update: now I've finished reading the article, my impression is that complexity is mostly inherent to this problem space. I'd be glad to be proven wrong, though!
I think any of the webhook-based providers are better, because you can isolate your secrets. PRs go to a PR webhook that runs in an environment that just doesn’t have access to any secrets.
Releases go to the release webhook, which should output nothing and ideally should be a separate machine/VM with firewall rules and DNS blocks that prevent traffic to anywhere not strictly required.
Things are a lot harder to secure with modern dynamic infrastructure, though. Makes me feel old, but things were simpler when you could say service X has IP Y and add firewall rules around it. Nowadays that service probably has 15 IP addresses that change once a week.
The complexity comes from how the whole system is designed.
There’s no single repository or curated packages as is typical in any distribution: instead actions pull other actions, and they’re basically very complex wrapper around scripts which downloads binaries from all over the place.
For lots of very simple actions, instead of installing a distribution package and running a single command, a whole “action” is used which creates and entire layer of abstraction over that command.
It’s all massive complexity on top of huge abstractions, none of which were designed with security in mind: it was just gradually bolted on top over the years.
The only binaries of uv in the world you can get that were full source bootstrapped from signed package commits to signed reviews to multi-signed deterministic artifacts are the ones from my teammates and I at stagex.
All keys on geodistributed smartcards held by maintainers tied to a web of trust going back 25 years with over 5000 keys.
Though thankful for clients that let individual maintainers work on stagex part time once in a while, we have had one donation ever for $50 as a project. (thanks)
Why is it a bunch of mostly unpaid volunteer hackers are putting more effort into supply chain security than OpenAI.
OpenClaw has been an outstanding success, it is providing people the ability to leak their keys, secrets, and personal data, and allowing people to be subject to an incredible number of supply chain attacks when its users have felt their attack surface was just too low.
Your efforts have been on increasing security and reducing supply chain attacks, when the market is strongly signaling to you that people want reduced security and more supply chain attacks!
I don't think you are annoyed. You have done this to produce a reproducible linux distribution which your partners sell support for.
I wouldn't find this annoying at all - I would expect to have to do this for hundreds of packages.
Without unpaid volunteers things like Debian do not exist. Don't malign the situation and circumstances of other projects, especially if they are your competitors.
Compete by being better, not by complaining louder.
>Why is it a bunch of mostly unpaid volunteer hackers are putting more effort into supply chain security than OpenAI.
Unpaid volunteer hackers provide their work for free under licenses designed for the purpose of allowing companies like OpenAI to use their work without paying or contributing in any form. OpenAI wants to make the most money. Why would they spend any time or money on something they can get for free?
Only if they provide the software or software as a service. Then I suspect it's good enough if the modifications or forks made are shared internally if software is used only internally, but on the other hand I'm not a lawyer.
This is the point. They can use and modify it, but they also have to share their modifications, i.e., help its development. Yet most megacorps never even touch this license.
Never let the left hand know what the right hand is doing. I suppose it works both ways here, but the specific end user is not why people make code available, it’s in the hope of improving things, even just the tiniest bit.
> All keys on geodistributed smartcards held by maintainers tied to a web of trust going back 25 years with over 5000 keys.
Neither the age nor the cardinality of the key graph tells me anything if I don’t trust the maintainers themselves; given that you’re fundamentally providing third-party builds, what’s the threat model you’re addressing?
It’s worth nothing that all builds of uv come from a locked resolution and, as mentioned in TFA, you can get signed artifacts from us. So I’m very murky on the value of signed package commits that come from a different set of identities than the ones actually building the software.
StageX does reproducible builds, so they are signed independently and can also be verified locally. I don't think it applies to Astral, but it's useful for packages with a single maintainer or a vulnerable CI, where there is only one point of failure.
But I also think it'd be nice if projects provided a first-party StageX build, like many do with a Dockerfile or a Nix flake.
> Why is it a bunch of mostly unpaid volunteer hackers are putting more effort into supply chain security than OpenAI.
Didn't the acquisition only happen a few weeks ago? Wouldn't it be more alarming if OpenAI had gone in and forced them to change their build process? Unless you're claiming that the article is lying about this being a description of what they've already been doing for a while (which seems a bit outlandish without more evidence), it's not clear to me why you're attributing this process to the parent company.
Don't get me wrong; there's plenty you can criticize OpenAI over, and I'm not taking a stance on your technical claims, but it seems somewhat disingenuous to phrase it like this.
Yeah, I'll just establish for the record that we've been thinking about this for a long time, and that it has nothing to do with anybody except our own interests in keeping our development and release processes secure.
I promise we are actively working on a much better solution we hope any distro can use, but... for now we just enforce signed merge commits by a different maintainer other than the author as something they only do for code they personally reviewed.
>Why is it a bunch of mostly unpaid volunteer hackers are putting more effort into supply chain security than OpenAI.
To be frank. Because more effort doesn't actually mean that something is more secure. Just because you check extra things or take extra steps that doesn't mean it actually results in tangibly better security.
If anyone from Astral sees this: at this level of effort, how do you deal with the enormous dependence on Github itself? You maintain social connections with upstream, and with PyPA... what if Github is compromised/buggy and changes the effect of some setting you depend on?
We talk to GitHub as well! You're right that they are an enormous and critical dependency, and we pay close attention to the changes they make to their platform.
What if? GitHub has is extremely buggy! I'm getting increasingly frustrated with the paper cuts that have become endemic across the entire platform. For example its not uncommon for one of our workflows to fail when cloning a branches of the repo they are running in.
One (amongst other) big problem with current software supply chain is that a lot of tools and dependencies are downloaded (eg from GitHub releases) without any validation that it was published by the expected author. That's why I'm working on an open source, auditable, accountless, self hostable, multi sig file authentication solution. The multi sig approach can protect against axios-like breaches. If this is of interest to you, take a look at https://asfaload.com/
Yes, that's why I aim to make the checks transparant to the user. You only need to provide the download url for the authentication to take place. I really need to record a small demo of it.
Artifact attestation are indeed another solution based on https://www.sigstore.dev/ . I still think Asfaload is a good alternative, making different choices than sigstore:
- Asfaload is accountless(keys are identity) while sigstore relies on openid connect[1], which will tie most user to a mega corp
- Asfaload ' backend is a public git, making it easily auditable
- Asfaload will be easy to self host, meaning you can easily deploy it internally
- Asfaload is multisig, meaning event if GitHub account is breached, malevolent artifacts can be detected
- validating a download is transparant to the user, which only requires the download url, contrary to sigstore [2]
So Asfaload is not the only solution, but I think it has some unique characteristics that make it worth evaluating.
Overall I believe this is the right approach and something like this is what's required. I can't see any code or your product though so I'm not sure what to make of it.
I maintain `repomatic`, a Python CLI + reusable workflows. It bakes most of the practices from this post into a drop-in setup for Python projects (uv-based, but works for others too). The goal is to make the secure default the easy default for maintainers who just want to ship packages. Also addresses a lot of GitHub Actions own shortcomings.
But thanks to the article I added a new check for the fork PR workflow approval policy.
The open source ecosystem has come very far and proven to be resilient. And while trust will remain a crucial part of any ecosystem, we urgently need to improve our tools and practices when it comes to sandboxing 3rd party code.
Almost every time I bump into uv in project work, the touted benefit is that it makes it easier to run projects with different python versions and avoiding clashes of 3rd dependencies - basically pyenv + venv + speed.
That sends a cold shiver down my spine, because it tells me that people are running all these different tools on their host machine with zero sandboxing.
Mainly the "project" system. I'm only developing python in my free time, not professionally so I'm not as well versed in its ecosystem as I would be in PHP. The fact that there's tons of way to have project-like stuff I don't want to deal with thoses. I used to do raw python containers + requirements.txt but the DX was absolutely not enjoyable. I'm just used to it now
Pinning github actions by commit SHA does not solve the supply chain problem if the pinned action itself is pulling in other dependencies which themselves could be compromised. An action can pull in a docker image as a dependency for example. It is effectively security theatre. The real fix is owning the code that runs in your CI pipelines. Or fork the action itself and maintain it as part of your infrastructure.
Shouldn't you always read & double-check the 3rd-party GitHub actions you use, anyway? (Forking or copying their code alone doesn't solve the issue you mention any more than pinning a SHA does.)
Double checking Github actions does not mitigate threats from supply chain vulnerabilities. Forking an action moves the trust from a random developer to yourself. You still have to make sure the action is pulling in dependencies from trusted sources which can also be yourself depending on how far you want to go.
Owning, auditing, and maintaining your entire supply chain stack is more secure than pinning hashes, but it is not practical for most projects.
Pinning your hashes is more secure than not pinning, and is close to free.
At the end of the day, the line of trust is drawn somewhere (do you audit the actions provided by GitHub?). It is not possible to write and release software without trusting some third party at some stage.
The important part is recognizing where your "points of trust" are, and making a conscious decision about what is worth doing yourself.
With the recent incidents affecting Trivy and litellm, I find it extremely useful to have a guide on what to do to secure your release process.
The advices here are really solid and actionable, and I would suggest any team to read them, and implement them if possible.
The scary part with supply chain security is that we are only as secure as our dependencies, and if the platform you’re using has non secure defaults, the efforts to secure the full chain are that much higher.
The entire paragraph about version pinning using hashes (and using a map lookup for in-workflow binary deps) reminds me that software engineers are forever doomed to reinvent worse versions of nixpkgs and flakes.
I don't even love Nix, it's full of pitfalls and weirdnesses, but it provides so much by-default immutability and reproducibility that I sometimes forget how others need to rediscover this stuff from first principles every time a supply chain attack makes the news.
Nix provides declarative, reproducible builds. So, ostensibly, if you had your build system using Nix, then some of the issues here go away.
Unfortunately, Nix is also not how most people function. You have to do things the Nix way, period. The value in part comes from this strong opinion, but it also makes it inherently niche. Most people do not want to learn an entire new language/paradigm just so they can get this feature. And so it becomes a chicken and egg problem. IMHO, I think it also suffers from a little bit of snobbery and poor naming (Nix vs. NixOS vs. Nixpkgs) which makes it that much harder to get traction.
Nix, if not used incorrectly (and they really make it hard to use it, both correctly and incorrectly lol), gives you reproducible and verifiable builds.
Unfortunately I have to agree with the sibling comment that it suffers from poor naming and the docs are very hard to grok which makes it harder to get traction.
I really hate the idea of `it's all sales at the end of the day` but if Nix could figure how to "sell" itself to more people then we would probably have less of those problems.
Even if you trust Microsoft's cloud engineering on the backend, this is a system that does not appear to follow even the most basic principles of privilege and isolation? I'm not sure why you would even try to build "supply-chain security" on top of this.
Now, as other commenter pointed out, maybe this is just inherent complexity in this space. But more secure defaults could go a long way making this more secure in practice.
[1] https://github.com/airutorg/sandbox-action
Update: now I've finished reading the article, my impression is that complexity is mostly inherent to this problem space. I'd be glad to be proven wrong, though!
Releases go to the release webhook, which should output nothing and ideally should be a separate machine/VM with firewall rules and DNS blocks that prevent traffic to anywhere not strictly required.
Things are a lot harder to secure with modern dynamic infrastructure, though. Makes me feel old, but things were simpler when you could say service X has IP Y and add firewall rules around it. Nowadays that service probably has 15 IP addresses that change once a week.
There’s no single repository or curated packages as is typical in any distribution: instead actions pull other actions, and they’re basically very complex wrapper around scripts which downloads binaries from all over the place.
For lots of very simple actions, instead of installing a distribution package and running a single command, a whole “action” is used which creates and entire layer of abstraction over that command.
It’s all massive complexity on top of huge abstractions, none of which were designed with security in mind: it was just gradually bolted on top over the years.
All keys on geodistributed smartcards held by maintainers tied to a web of trust going back 25 years with over 5000 keys.
https://stagex.tools/packages/core/uv/
Though thankful for clients that let individual maintainers work on stagex part time once in a while, we have had one donation ever for $50 as a project. (thanks)
Why is it a bunch of mostly unpaid volunteer hackers are putting more effort into supply chain security than OpenAI.
I am annoyed.
OpenClaw has been an outstanding success, it is providing people the ability to leak their keys, secrets, and personal data, and allowing people to be subject to an incredible number of supply chain attacks when its users have felt their attack surface was just too low.
Your efforts have been on increasing security and reducing supply chain attacks, when the market is strongly signaling to you that people want reduced security and more supply chain attacks!
I wouldn't find this annoying at all - I would expect to have to do this for hundreds of packages.
Without unpaid volunteers things like Debian do not exist. Don't malign the situation and circumstances of other projects, especially if they are your competitors.
Compete by being better, not by complaining louder.
Unpaid volunteer hackers provide their work for free under licenses designed for the purpose of allowing companies like OpenAI to use their work without paying or contributing in any form. OpenAI wants to make the most money. Why would they spend any time or money on something they can get for free?
Like anything good you do an evil person could benefit from - is the solution to never do any good?
Internal users are still users tho. They are entitled to see source code and license allows them to share it with the rest if of the world.
> All keys on geodistributed smartcards held by maintainers tied to a web of trust going back 25 years with over 5000 keys.
Neither the age nor the cardinality of the key graph tells me anything if I don’t trust the maintainers themselves; given that you’re fundamentally providing third-party builds, what’s the threat model you’re addressing?
It’s worth nothing that all builds of uv come from a locked resolution and, as mentioned in TFA, you can get signed artifacts from us. So I’m very murky on the value of signed package commits that come from a different set of identities than the ones actually building the software.
But I also think it'd be nice if projects provided a first-party StageX build, like many do with a Dockerfile or a Nix flake.
Didn't the acquisition only happen a few weeks ago? Wouldn't it be more alarming if OpenAI had gone in and forced them to change their build process? Unless you're claiming that the article is lying about this being a description of what they've already been doing for a while (which seems a bit outlandish without more evidence), it's not clear to me why you're attributing this process to the parent company.
Don't get me wrong; there's plenty you can criticize OpenAI over, and I'm not taking a stance on your technical claims, but it seems somewhat disingenuous to phrase it like this.
https://github.com/crev-dev/
To be frank. Because more effort doesn't actually mean that something is more secure. Just because you check extra things or take extra steps that doesn't mean it actually results in tangibly better security.
The blog is mostly focused on hardening the CI/CD pipeline.
What if? GitHub has is extremely buggy! I'm getting increasingly frustrated with the paper cuts that have become endemic across the entire platform. For example its not uncommon for one of our workflows to fail when cloning a branches of the repo they are running in.
[0] https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/secure-your-work/...
All the axios releases had attestations except for the compromised one. npm installed it anyway.
- Asfaload is accountless(keys are identity) while sigstore relies on openid connect[1], which will tie most user to a mega corp
- Asfaload ' backend is a public git, making it easily auditable
- Asfaload will be easy to self host, meaning you can easily deploy it internally
- Asfaload is multisig, meaning event if GitHub account is breached, malevolent artifacts can be detected
- validating a download is transparant to the user, which only requires the download url, contrary to sigstore [2]
So Asfaload is not the only solution, but I think it has some unique characteristics that make it worth evaluating.
1:https://docs.sigstore.dev/about/security/
2: https://docs.sigstore.dev/cosign/verifying/verify/
SPOF. I'd suggest use automatic tools to audit every line of code no matter who the author is.
There's also a spec of the approach at https://github.com/asfaload/spec
I'm looking for early testers, let me know if you are interested to test it !
But thanks to the article I added a new check for the fork PR workflow approval policy.
More at: https://github.com/kdeldycke/repomatic
Almost every time I bump into uv in project work, the touted benefit is that it makes it easier to run projects with different python versions and avoiding clashes of 3rd dependencies - basically pyenv + venv + speed.
That sends a cold shiver down my spine, because it tells me that people are running all these different tools on their host machine with zero sandboxing.
ps. I feel like I've been doing python so long that my workflows have routed around a lot of legit problems :)
To be clear though, we only use uv in the builder stage of our docker builds, there is no uv in the final image.
And that doesn't prevent me from running it into a sandbox or vm for an additional layer of security.
A PR to be able to use a relative timestamp in pip was merged just last week
https://github.com/pypa/pip/pull/13837/commits
We audit all of our actions, check if they pull in mutable dependencies, contribute upstream fixes, and migrate off using any action when we can.
(I work at Astral)
I disagree. Security is always a trade-off.
Owning, auditing, and maintaining your entire supply chain stack is more secure than pinning hashes, but it is not practical for most projects.
Pinning your hashes is more secure than not pinning, and is close to free.
At the end of the day, the line of trust is drawn somewhere (do you audit the actions provided by GitHub?). It is not possible to write and release software without trusting some third party at some stage.
The important part is recognizing where your "points of trust" are, and making a conscious decision about what is worth doing yourself.
The advices here are really solid and actionable, and I would suggest any team to read them, and implement them if possible.
The scary part with supply chain security is that we are only as secure as our dependencies, and if the platform you’re using has non secure defaults, the efforts to secure the full chain are that much higher.
I don't even love Nix, it's full of pitfalls and weirdnesses, but it provides so much by-default immutability and reproducibility that I sometimes forget how others need to rediscover this stuff from first principles every time a supply chain attack makes the news.
You mean statically-compiled binaries and hash pinning? Those have been around a bit longer than Nix :-)
Unfortunately, Nix is also not how most people function. You have to do things the Nix way, period. The value in part comes from this strong opinion, but it also makes it inherently niche. Most people do not want to learn an entire new language/paradigm just so they can get this feature. And so it becomes a chicken and egg problem. IMHO, I think it also suffers from a little bit of snobbery and poor naming (Nix vs. NixOS vs. Nixpkgs) which makes it that much harder to get traction.
https://reproducible.nixos.org
It is still good at that but the difference to other distros is rather small:
https://reproducible-builds.org/citests/
Unfortunately I have to agree with the sibling comment that it suffers from poor naming and the docs are very hard to grok which makes it harder to get traction.
I really hate the idea of `it's all sales at the end of the day` but if Nix could figure how to "sell" itself to more people then we would probably have less of those problems.
https://github.com/backnotprop/oss-security-audit