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Comment by megous | Hacker News Reader

Moving to github doesn't change anything fundamentally. It just moves infrastructure hosting to someone else (even though it may or may not be a more secure hosting).

Something like signing commits, and requiring all commits to be signed properly with a known key (and checking this on push and before release) would be an independent verification layer, and a more fundamental response to the compromise.

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It moves infrastructure to someone else _whose core job it is to manage this infrastructure_. I definitely trust GH more than myself in managing a git infrastructure securely

That's assuming the self-hosted git server itself was compromised, and it wasn't just a simple matter of the attacker stealing some committer's private keys.

If that's what happened, then moving to Github solves nothing.

> I definitely trust GH more than myself in managing a git infrastructure securely

That's FUD, and appropriate too considering who owns Github now.

in comments on the first commit it was said that the access was revoked, but another one appeared, which points at the server

Did you notice that the commit was reverted, but then almost immediately re-applied? This is a strong indication that the server admins did not know the how the server was compromised.

With Github, you can: (1) use "events" API to see which account did the push and (2) remove the account's ssh keys and change password from a secure machine to stop compromise right away. This stops the compromise completely.

Compared to that, if there was a compromise on our own server, it is quite hard to tell that everything was cleaned. Remember kernel.org compromise in 2011 [0]? They took a few weeks to recover, and this was with some of the best programmers.

[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/464233/

It's the style of the times: techno-feudalism. Serve a powerful enough feudal lord by doing your business on their servers and you'll be protected.

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