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Comment by brabel | Hacker News Reader

Everyone working on important open source code should have a real identity associated with them. The fact that "Jia Tan" was able to become a maintainer without anyone ever trying to figure out their real identity shows a huge weakness in our trust model in OSS (everyone real would have something like a Linked In page, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or better, their own website with stuff that could be used to ensure they're a real person - that could be faked as well but the amount of effort would be high, and checking this would be much better than just allowing effectively anonymous users to be maintainers - there's just no need for anonymity in this scenario!).

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> everyone real would have something like a Linked In page, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or better, their own website with stuff that could be used to ensure they're a real person

Oof, I guess I’m not real then, as I have none of those things.

On top of what you mentioned I also dislike the TSA-like response the OSS community is taking with this happen stance.

I have anonomously contributed to many projects because I enjoy my privacy. All of my founding projects have also been done with anonymity.

Because someone wants their anonmity and privacy does not mean they're nefarious, and I find it funny the group that takes to these principals most is negging on those ideas.

Personally, I do find it hard to trust an open source project maintained by an anonymous person. (I'm talking about maintainership, not regular contributions that need to be code reviewed by another maintainer) I may toy around with them but I will probably not use them in a manner where I need to trust them continuously.

It's totally cool for you to do whatever you want, since it's a free world after all, but if you want other people to use your code, then it's a two-way street no? Your code has a direct effect on their computers, and so they are placing their trust on you. You may value your privacy, but you need to balance that with other people's valuing their own security, and it's likely that whatever project you maintain may have an alternative as well.

If you just want to commit some code and not have people use them then that's another issue altogether.

I guess what I'm saying is: it's a two-way street. You can do things anonymously, but big companies / projects also don't have an obligation to use your code.

> You can do things anonymously, but big companies / projects also don't have an obligation to use your code.

You're not wrong here, but I'm not forcing anyone to use my code bases or contributions.

Also, think about how many systems you blindly trust on a daily basis.

When you drive over a bridge, did you research the maitenance procedures and compliance was up to date?

When you got a house or apartment, did you look into the engineering sign offs and construction companies? And that maitenance has been done up to snuff? Even down to hoping the inspector knows what they're doing?

When you step into an elevator do you check the recent inspection plaque?

When you get on an airplane are you aware of its maitenance history? And to further my point by refering back to the house example, did the company even QA the plane before they shipped it?

And most importantly, did you check into whether the people actually did these things versus just saying they did them?

What kind of trust does having a persons name attached to the project actually provide? I would argue its a psuedo-facade trust basis that gives a false sense of security.

The truth of the matter is that you blindly trust millions of things on a daily basis. Including the very system you type from, which I guaruntee you has more than one anonymous maitainer attached to its underlying software.

I totally get where you're coming from, but the same problems exist in every industry, supply, politics, every facet of your life is based on many blind trust principles.

The one difference here with anonymous open source contributors is that they give you the code to read through yourself (and hope that you help ;) )

Very much unlike the proprietary software you're running beside it.

I have Facebook and the account and what's on it is no one's -ing business in a professional context.

I wouldn't post anything on Facebook (or on social media generally) that could be professionally embarrassing but I also don't generally accept invites from people who are solely professional acquaintances or use it in a purely professional context at all.

> I wouldn't post anything on Facebook (or on social media generally) that could be professionally embarrassing

The age of self censorship :)

I don't post anything on my FB. I'd still reject any employer who wanted to take a look.

Self-censorship is probably a good thing in many cases. And there are certainly things I don't care to share in writing on any public or semi-public medium.

But I agree that even if I can't keep an employer from sleuthing generally, I don't consider Facebook part of my professional record even if there's nothing on there I'd have a problem with a co-worker or potential co-worker seeing.

>> what's on it is no one's -ing business in a professional context.

> The age of self censorship :)

I find this amusing.

I would also like to know what you hoped to achieve by self censoring the word fucking in your message above.

- HN doesn't block posts with any kind of "profanity" filter

- You didn't spare anyone from the profanity, since we all knew exactly what you were saying/thinking

So I'm really curious what that actually achieved.

That one amuses me because of a character in a (iirc) fantasy book that swore all the time but used just -ing everywhere. Sadly I don’t remember what character of which book…

It's Mr Tulip, of Terry Pratchett's The Truth.

Thank you! I was pretty sure it was Pratchett (but not which book and character) but I self censored in case i was wrong :)

Also this can all be faked

No-one working on open source code on their time owes anything to anyone using the code. If you want an important open source project to be maintaned by non-anonymous person, surprise-surprise, hire that person and pay them.

Besides, some of the best open source contributors I know are almost-anonymous people behind nicknames and anime girls avatars.

At the same time no one is obligated to use your source code. I think the point here is from now on people (companies and large projects) may be more paranoid about anonymous contributors and refuse to sign off on using code maintained exclusively by them. It's fine for people to stay anonymous, but they just run the risk of not having the credibility for adoption and need to accept that.

But yes, I do trust certain figures like that, e.g. Asahi Lina. It's a fine ambiguous line. But at least in Asahi Linux there are real known human figures and they know who Asahi Lina is.

It is not about owing someone... it's about having provenance of code.

If you're just an anonymous guy doing stuff for free and want to remain anonymous, that's fine, but then your software shouldn't be used by anyone who cares about toolchain attacks as there's just no way to trust you, and no way to verify every single commit you make on new releases.

For software that gets used by many, which is a goal of OSS (otherwise just don't even bother to publish stuff, what's the point?), there needs to be a face behind it.

I do agree with others that identity is a hard problem, but people here are pretending there's no solution to that (or misinterpreting what I wrote to mean people should have a Facebook or Twitter account, which is absolutely not what I was trying to say - I just mentioned the most popular websites real people are likely to be found on, as that could be used to prove their identity... for example, I have a Keybase account where my proof of identity, which is tied to my public keys, can be found on my GitHub profile - but they let you choose Facebook or Twitter for that purpose as well) when obviously there is. I should know, I work on this space.

> If you're just an anonymous guy doing stuff for free and want to remain anonymous, that's fine, but then your software shouldn't be used by anyone who cares about toolchain attacks as there's just no way to trust you, and no way to verify every single commit you make on new releases.

What is, from security point of view, the difference between a toolchain attack performed by an anonymous contributor and by an identifiable real person?

> For software that gets used by many, which is a goal of OSS

It's not. The goal of OSS is to give users the possibility to study, change and improve the software. And that includes giving you ability to independently audit the code. All of that does not need any person behind it.

> everyone real would have something like a Linked In page, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or better, their own website with stuff that could be used to ensure they're a real person

Have you seen the campaigns people have run building fake LinkedIn profiles and slowly adding “connections”? There was one a few years ago which roped in a lot infosec people who should have known better and it’s gotten much worse with AI generators. Even before LLMs what you described would have been a godsend for intelligence agencies - who has more time for it, an open source developer writing actual code or the dedicated social media team at the IRA? – and now that’s increasingly worse.

I believe the solution to identity on the Internet needs to be tied to governments, that's unfortunate but in real life, that's always been the case and I can see no alternative here. Blockchain is a pipedream and no serious work is going to associate a person's identity to a key which cannot be revoked, cannot be recovered in case of "loss", can be tracked on a public ledger etc. etc...

But there's actual good work going on in the identity industry, like Verifiable Credentials, so this will become a reality soon: you will be able to verify someone's identity as long as you trust the issuer of their "credential" (which in the case here would mean basically a username and a public key or reference to a JWKS which can be used to verify the signature of the person, very much like the digital version of an identity card which can be used to check the signature on some piece of paper, but actually cyptographically safe)... so you would need to add a few governments to your list of "approved issuers", or something more indirect like universities (which themselves would rely on the government-issued identity) or traffic authorities (if you rely on driving licenses). Sure, Governments can lie, and people go to great lengths to steal others' identities in real life, but in the current world, we're still able to get bank accounts, passports etc. based on this model... just because the system is not perfect doesnt' mean it's not good enough, specially when there's no better alternative at all.

What is real identity? Anything online can be faked. A state-issued id? How that protects against nation state?

Nothing protects you if you're up against a state. That doesn't mean we should give up completely.

Do you have a passport? That's a real identity in most places. Soon, it may be possible to use that to link your identity to a set of public keys which you can then use to identify yourself.

There's a lot of work to be done to make this a reality, but work is surely going on right now and this is going to be possible one day.

Check this out, as a starting point: https://curity.io/resources/learn/verifiable-credentials/

Why would I trust an "important open source project" with my identity?

It goes both ways.

Besides, the 'state actor' the security theater people keep mentioning would have no trouble creating such real identities.

If you don't trust the project, you wouldn't contribute to it.

The state actor may be able to fake identities, but that would still allow tracking the identity to a particular state... and if caught multiple times, that state would start losing credibility and projects may choose to stop trusting people from such nationality, unfortunately, or at least require more strong evidence the person is real and trustworthy if they come from known rogue nations.

> If you don't trust the project, you wouldn't contribute to it.

Trust them to merge a bugfix is different from trusting them with my identity isn't it?

There are degrees of trust. For example I have a gmail address in my profile because the spam filter on there is better than what I have on my personal domain. People I've known for longer, business or otherwise, get the other (that I read more often).

News just in: NSA et al. defeated after having to create a LinkedIn and Instagram profile for their agents.

If you want security, pay for independent code audits (not compliance bullshit). Repeatedly. Don't offload your desires onto one-man-shows that the world decided are useful tools.

None of those things prove identity. A well funded or just patient attacker can spoof all of those. Sure, it raises the bar a tiny bit, but it's no proof of identity.

Yeah, it's not enforced (and certainly not with linked-in and facebook) but it's really not uncommon to require use of real names for contributions.

Linux doesn't allow anonymous contributions:

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/submitting-pa...

and this guide has been adopted by a lot of GPL-licensed projects (at least openwrt, glibc and gcc).

Wasn't there some controversies around this before? I remember there was some talk of why Asahi Lina (anonymous vtuber working on Asahi Linux) can contribute code to Linux. From casual search: https://www.spinics.net/lists/kernel/msg4888830.html

FWIW I like Asahi Lina, just trying to understand the discrepencies

Interesting. My understanding is that these projects don't allow anonymous contributions to make their copyright situation clear, so in theory if marcan42 sent a letter to the linux project saying that contributions from Asahi Lina are actually theirs, they might reasonably be fine with that.

It seems like this is how the ASF runs: you can be anonymous publicly, but you have to sign their CLA (or whatever they call it) properly.

To me, the people trying to unmask Asahi Lina are being simultaneously mean and silly. If it's so obvious that it's marcan42 doing a voice, do you really need to point it out? That's kind of the joke.

I'm not sure why the downvotes. That seems to be a statement of fact.

You can do a certain amount of identity obfuscation online but for anyone with a real professional profile you're generally not really anonymous if anyone really cares to find out your true name.

Me neither, i even provided a source, and it's easy to find other examples. There certainly are projects that allow anonymous contributions, but i doubt it's the majority of projects that one would consider important.

For these kinds of projects you could make up an identity relatively easily and nobody would know, but you're screwing over the project (as they may need to remove your contributions if they find out), so it's not something to be doing if you actually want to contribute (instead of inserting backdoors).

The original idea (not being able to contribute without a verified identity) is still wrong, but it's wrong because it's impractical to prove identity in a way that people find acceptable (and works), not because people will not give up anonymity, as many of the replies state.

There are people who downvote things that present facts that aren't in accordance with how they think the world should be.

I do think it's difficult to verify identity in any reasonably acceptable lightweight way. That said, for the larger projects I'm most familiar with, a lot of people work for companies, attend conferences, etc. They may go by nicknames day to day, but they have known real identities and their professional existence wouldn't be possible without one.

Who are you to propose requirements onto people who work for free?

I am not imposing anything on anyone. I am only saying that an OSS project that aims to be used as part of important infrastructure should impose at least some sort of identity vetoing and not just make random anonymous users maintainers of anything.

If your project is not important and you don't care about any of this security stuff, feel free to continue publishing your untrustable projects.

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