[Distutils] What to do about the PyPI mirrors

[Noah Kantrowitz]

On Aug 5, 2013, at 11:56 PM, holger krekel <holger at merlinux.eu> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 05, 2013 at 23:31 -0700, Noah Kantrowitz wrote:
>> On Aug 5, 2013, at 11:11 PM, Christian Theune <ct at gocept.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Two more things:
>>> 
>>> why is the CDN not suffering from the security problems you describe for the mirrors?
>>> 
>>> a) Fastly seems to be the one owning the certificate for pypi.python.org. What?!?
>> 
>> They have a delegated SAN for it, which digicert (the CA) authorizes with the domain contact (the board in this case).
>> 
>>> b) What does stop Fastly from introducing incorrect/rogue code in package downloads?
>> 
>> Basically this one boils down to personal trust from me to the Fastly team combined with the other companies using them being very reputable. At the end of the day, there is not currently any cryptographic mechanism preventing Fastly from doing bad things.
> 
> The problem is not so much trusting individuals but that the companies
> in question are based in the US.  If its government wants to temporarily
> serve backdoored packages to select regions, they could silently force Fastly
> to do it.  I guess the only way around this is to work with pypi- and
> eventually author/maintainer-signatures and verification.

No, I have carefully selected whom I trust to work with on the PSF infrastructure. I can promise you there is a 100% chance that the head of Fastly would sooner shut down the company than allow a government interdiction of any kind. I extend this trust to Dyn and OSL as well, and I do not do so lightly.

--Noah

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