How would package signing have prevented this?
It makes a lot more sense to use cryptography to verify that releases are not malicious directly. Tools like crev [1], vouch [2], and cargo-vet [3] allow you to trust your colleagues or specific people to review packages before you install them. That way you don't have to trust their authors or package repositories at all.
That seems like a much more viable path forward than expecting package repositories to audit packages or trying to assign trust onto random developers.
[1]: https://github.com/crev-dev/crev [2]: https://github.com/vouch-dev/vouch [3]: https://github.com/mozilla/cargo-vet
Then again, if someone wants to pay me to do nothing but read and vouchsafe code, hell, why not. As QA I basically do that anyway. Will have to think on this.
Yes ultimately someone you trust has to vouch for the library for you to trust it. That's unavoidable either way. Those systems only allow for that person to be anyone instead of just the author.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/dotnet-n...
... we do it anyway because the alternative is to just get 0wnz3d by bad actors.
Hypothetically, this could be done: put up a public key at a known domain, sign packages via public key, and if the package manager extends to include a "fetch from URL provided by the package and check signature" tool, we end up rooting trust in packages in trust in domain name ownership; not too shabby. We still need devs to actually bother to do the check and, like, read the domain name to make sure they haven't accepted authorization from "micr0soft.com", but the end result is a distributed signing solution that doesn't require any centralized authority (except, indirectly, the SSL cert issuers and DNS providers of the world).
You could have alerts when an old account is using a new key that nobody has seen before, for example.