attestation VS slsa

It's multi-pronged and I imagine adopters may use a subset of features. Broadly, I think folks are going to be interested in a) branch/tag/reference protection rules, b) file protection rules (monorepo or otherwise, though monorepos do pose a very apt usecase for gittuf), and c) general key management for those who primarily care about Git signing.

For those who care about a and b, I think the work we want to do to support [in-toto attestations](https://github.com/in-toto/attestation) for [SLSA's upcoming source track](https://github.com/slsa-framework/slsa/issues/956) could be very interesting as well.

I have. I actually worked a few desks down from dpc when he was creating it and we talked about it at length. I felt then and now that it has good goals but a very limiting implementation in that it does not pursue a portable spec and instead anchors a very opinionated format to git, and github, instead of cryptographic keys held in hardware owned controlled by reviewers. I want to see the same keys that sign git commits also sign reviews, for instance.

I think for broad adoption a review system should ask essentially the same questions as crev, but store them in a format like in-toto including signatures by the reviewers created with a user choice of pgp smartcards, ssh keys, or webauthn devices. These reviews would be anchored to hashes of a particular state of a particular tree of code and not to any type of VCS or distribution system. Important code is distributed via Perforce, mercurial subversion, and tar files depending if we are talking about big corps, or linux distro building blocks. A good OSS review system should be also be usable by teams in their internal proprietary codebases too if we wish to see wide adoption. Even for OSS we may wish to share some reviews as standalone objects privately while security embargos are in place, etc. Proofs should also be verified standalone easily from local cache, when github is down, when original repos vanish, etc.

Something that meets these broader needs will make it easy for large orgs with very different internal setups to participate and play nice with other supply chain efforts by the OpenSSF using in-toto for reproducible builds, etc.

My experience tells me we need something much more ambitious than crev, but crev proved to me many people have real interest in this problem which I really thank dpc for.

The biggest blocker for starting this project is the human review spec settling in in-toto https://github.com/in-toto/attestation/issues/77

Short answer: not where it counts.

My work focuses on recognizing known functions in obfuscated binaries, but there are some papers you might want to check out related to deobfuscation, if not necessarily using ML for deobfuscation or decompilation.

My take is that ML can soundly defeat the "easy" and more static obfuscation types (encodings, control flow flattening, splitting functions). It's low hanging fruit, and it's what I worked on most, but adoption is slow. On the other hand, "hard" obfuscations like virtualized functions or programs which embed JIT compilers to obfuscate at runtime... as far as I know, those are still unsolved problems.

This is a good overview of the subject, but pretty old and doesn't cover "hard" obfuscations: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1566145.

https://www.jinyier.me/papers/DATE19_Obf.pdf uses deobfuscation for RTL logic (FGPA/ASIC domain) with SAT solvers. Might be useful for a point of view from a fairly different domain.

https://advising.cs.arizona.edu/~debray/Publications/generic... uses "semantics-preserving transformations" to shed obfuscation. I think this approach is the way to go, especially when combined with dynamic/symbolic analysis to mitigate virt/jit types of transformations.

I'll mention this one as a cautionary tale: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2886012 has some good general info but glosses over the machine learning approach. It considers Hex-rays' FLIRT to be "machine learning", but FLIRT just hashes signatures, can be spoofed (i.e. https://siliconpr0n.org/uv/issues_with_flirt_aware_malware.p...), and is useless against obfuscation.

Eventually I think SBOM tools like Black Duck[1] and SLSA[2] will incorporate ML to improve the accuracy of even figuring out what dependencies a piece of software actually has.

[1]: https://www.synopsys.com/software-integrity/software-composi...

[2]: https://slsa.dev/

The dependency chain is certified! SLSA!

The things you mentioned are not solved by a typical "SBOM" but e.g. CycloneDX has extra fields to record provenance and pedigree and things like in-toto (https://in-toto.io/) or SLSA (https://slsa.dev/) also aim to work in this field.

I've spent the last six months in this field and people will tell you that this or that is an industry best practice or "a standard" but in my experience none of that is true. Everyone is still trying to figure out how best to protect the software supply chain security and things are still very much in flux.

It's multi-pronged and I imagine adopters may use a subset of features. Broadly, I think folks are going to be interested in a) branch/tag/reference protection rules, b) file protection rules (monorepo or otherwise, though monorepos do pose a very apt usecase for gittuf), and c) general key management for those who primarily care about Git signing.

For those who care about a and b, I think the work we want to do to support [in-toto attestations](https://github.com/in-toto/attestation) for [SLSA's upcoming source track](https://github.com/slsa-framework/slsa/issues/956) could be very interesting as well.

It doesn't have to be. Corporations which are FedRAMP[1] compliant, have to build software reproducibly in a fully isolated environment, only from reviewed code.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedRAMP

[2] https://slsa.dev/

SLSA stands for Supply chain Levels for Software Artifacts, and it is a framework that aims to provide a set of best practices for the software supply chain, with a focus on OSS. It was created by Google, and it is now part of the OpenSSF. It consists of four levels of assurance, from Level 1 to Level 4, that correspond to different degrees of protection against supply chain attacks. Our CTO Paolo Mainardi mentioned SLSA in a very good article on software supply chain security, and we also mentioned it in another article about securing OCI Artifacts on Kubernetes.

SLSA.dev