The Next 5 Years of Supply Chain Security on PyPI

title	The Next 5 Years of Supply Chain Security on PyPI
date	2024-11-12
authors	William Woodruff
conference	SigstoreCon 2024
resources	label path Slides slides.pdf

Over the last 5 years, PyPI has adopted a large number of technologies and standards aimed at improving the integrity of the Python packaging ecosystem: scoped API tokens, security events, strong MFA, Trusted Publishing, and (most recently) PEP 740 for cryptographic package attestations.

This talk hypothesizes and breaks down the next 5 years of changes, ranging from immediately practical efforts to "big picture" ideas. Some ideas considered include (but are not limited to):

• Index-wide binary transparency in the style of Go's sumdb, along with considerations for identity (i.e. package identity) monitoring by upstreams;
• "Counter" attestations in the vein of PEP 740, enabling auditors and interested community members to cryptographically register their trust in a PyPI package;
• Scalable witnessing and monitoring for PEP 740 attestations, including rollup techniques for reducing the burden of integration for pure-Python package installers like pip;
• TOFU-style identity locking via lockfiles, including (potentially) Python's PEP 751;
• Using TUF to distribute complex identity policies.