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Comment by raphinou | Hacker News Reader

One (amongst other) big problem with current software supply chain is that a lot of tools and dependencies are downloaded (eg from GitHub releases) without any validation that it was published by the expected author. That's why I'm working on an open source, auditable, accountless, self hostable, multi sig file authentication solution. The multi sig approach can protect against axios-like breaches. If this is of interest to you, take a look at https://asfaload.com/

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I’m maybe not understanding here, but isn’t it the point of release attestations (to authenticate that the release was produced by the authors)?

[0] https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/secure-your-work/...

Artifact attestation are indeed another solution based on https://www.sigstore.dev/ . I still think Asfaload is a good alternative, making different choices than sigstore:

- Asfaload is accountless(keys are identity) while sigstore relies on openid connect[1], which will tie most user to a mega corp

- Asfaload ' backend is a public git, making it easily auditable

- Asfaload will be easy to self host, meaning you can easily deploy it internally

- Asfaload is multisig, meaning event if GitHub account is breached, malevolent artifacts can be detected

- validating a download is transparant to the user, which only requires the download url, contrary to sigstore [2]

So Asfaload is not the only solution, but I think it has some unique characteristics that make it worth evaluating.

1:https://docs.sigstore.dev/about/security/

2: https://docs.sigstore.dev/cosign/verifying/verify/

The problem is nobody checks.

All the axios releases had attestations except for the compromised one. npm installed it anyway.

Yes, that's why I aim to make the checks transparant to the user. You only need to provide the download url for the authentication to take place. I really need to record a small demo of it.

Overall I believe this is the right approach and something like this is what's required. I can't see any code or your product though so I'm not sure what to make of it.

Here's the GitHub repo of the backend code: https://github.com/asfaload/asfaload

There's also a spec of the approach at https://github.com/asfaload/spec

I'm looking for early testers, let me know if you are interested to test it !

> without any validation that it was published by the expected author

SPOF. I'd suggest use automatic tools to audit every line of code no matter who the author is.

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