Hacker News Reader

Comment by anothernewdude | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, just get rid of anything that has a binary blob. Cool. And then when PyPI gets swapped out for whatever immediately replaces it because PyPI is useless, then at least PyPI will be secure.

View on HN

For instance, F-Droid only permits software that can be verifiably compiled by them.

It essentially bans binary blobs yet it is very useful.

F-droid also has very different goals and lives in a much smaller and in some ways much saner ecosystem.

F-Droid is infamously known for taking weeks to build a new version of any app.

I'm given to understand that's more about having an offline signing process then the actual builds.

Yes, but pypi has 4 millions release to check, and the scientific and machine learning wheels are very hard to compile (scipy contains c, fortran and assembly code, and must be compiled to mac, linux and windows).

Providing a build env for that would make it prohibitively complicated and expensive, and basically would mirror github CI.

That's the reason continuum is making money: they sell a python package distribution channel that is checked and locked.

> PyPI is useless

Why will it be "useless". Explain your reasoning please.

Most of the libraries I use include compiled C/C++/Fortran/Rust code. Pandas, scipy, scikit-learn, … if I were limited to pure-python libraries, I would probably rather swap languages, or at least package manager, at great inconvenience.

That being said, I don’t think PyPI would be «useless» - this was the state a few years ago, and we had to compile all the libraries ourselves. I don’t want to go back.

> great inconvenience

It's a convenience/security trade-off, I see.

The only solution I've ever seen to that requires investing trust in an "authority" which then becomes corrupt and censorial. One simply expands the dilemma to a triad; security/freedom/convenience.

If I am not mistaken the PyPI "Cheese Shop" is owned by the Python Software Foundation, a 501(c3) nonprofit organisation which constitutionally values Software Freedom highly. It seems natural that convenience would be sacrificed if security is of concern.

Such an authority in the Linux world used to be a distribution. Installing a binary blob provided by Debian build servers is based on decades of trust.

But there is a tradeoff between having things thoroughly vetted and tested, and moving fast.

Interesting point. So as dimensions we now have

  - security
  
  - freedom
    
  - convenience
  
  - speed/newness

Who can build me a UI with four sliders that selects the packages I can install? Bonus: when I move a slider it highlights all the potential packages that changed status with reasons why they are now included/excluded.

You're an HN reader, so you should be able to knock this out over a weekend /s

You're right the prototype GUI is a weekend of work. But you also know that's not where the work is :) Now some more intelligent comments are coming in we can talk about the analysis and tagging of thousands of packages, dealing with backward compatibility and what happens when naughty malware just hops to another level of trust.

But none of that is a call to give up. We just need to think seriously about the problem we face.

None of those packages are downloading and running CRAP.EXE within the setup.py process, that's not how native extensions work. It should be possible to flag packages that are downloading things when setup.py runs, much less running exec within setup.py. a python package that really needs you to run a windows installer for its dependencies should have you be doing that separately.

Sure, I didn’t intend to claim that. It’s just a hassle for me to compile my own C code, which I’d have to do if binaries weren’t bundled. That’s why anaconda python took off on windows - it’s hard work to compile scipy on windows!

pypi delivers wheel files for pre-built binaries, and that's the only way one is supposed to distribute pre-built binary executables or shared libraries. the issue of "runs malicious code in setup.py" does not apply in that case because setup.py isn't invoked.

Yes but the problem here is the obfuscation of the malware code loading. No need to trigger it in the setup.py process, as long as you have it in the lib, you can always put a call in a .pth somewhere and run your malware as soon as any python is executed.

it should be possible to test packages for that also. if you are testing setup.py to see that no network access or exec occurs, you could similarly run the python interpreter after install and ensure no network / exec() happens at that point either, assuming one has not imported the package. or just disallow unfamiliar .pth files from being installed altogether (outside of those generated by setuptools / etc. for normal execution).

Given that every attempt to sandbox python failed, and that every system exposed to the public have been pwn, I assume this is a cat and mouse game we can't win.

At best I suppose we could put in place checks to get low hanging fruits. But we are, after all, allowing a turing complete and highly dynamic language to execute.

> or just disallow unfamiliar .pth files from being installed altogether

That would kill the entire plugin ecosystem.

Now, the next thing could be to have a permission system, requesting access to the network, fs, .pth, etc. It would not be a bad idea, given that we are, after all, installing things that are as powerful as apps.

But it would be a gigantic effort, and users still would just accept without reading, like they do with apps.

Windows S Mode has PyPI restricted to pure Python due to Device Guard. I'm happy to leave it on ($250 laptop). Indeed, Numpy has been a recurring blocker, maybe 3 times now. But with general peace of mind is the only way I've known Python/PyPI, so I'm pretty happy with it. I have a few RasPis that I can use as auxiliary devices as well, which I think is a pretty cool tradeoff, hardware sandbox--not gone there yet, beyond just configuring SSH/xRDP so I'm ready if the day comes.

But I've made a ton of web apps and tools anyway, including a little process launcher that plays the role of poor man's Docker.

It'd be nice if those popular systems had a pure Python capability anyway, similar analogy being software rendered 3D back in the day.

A simple warning when a library adds a binary blob should be enough. You don't need to ban them entirely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com