fulcio VS cargo-crev

untrue.

The Root CA is generated by the sigstore community (five folks, two from academia) this is what is used for the trust root for the signing. Right now github exchanges a OIDC token for a sigstore root chained cert.

GitLab are currently adding themselves, to have the same capability.

https://github.com/sigstore/fulcio/pull/1097

They also say thay they integrate with Fulcio which seems to be a self-managing CA. Never tried it, though.

https://docs.sigstore.dev/ :

> sigstore empowers software developers to securely sign software artifacts such as release files, container images, binaries, bill of material manifests and more. Signing materials are then stored in a tamper-resistant public log.

> It’s free to use for all developers and software providers, with sigstore’s code and operational tooling being 100% open source, and everything maintained and developed by the sigstore community.

> How sigstore works: Using Fulcio, sigstore requests a certificate from our root Certificate Authority (CA). This checks you are who you say you are using OpenID Connect, which looks at your email address to prove you’re the author. Fulcio grants a time-stamped certificate, a way to say you’re signed in and that it’s you.

https://github.com/sigstore/fulcio

> You don’t have to do anything with keys yourself, and sigstore never obtains your private key. The public key that Cosign creates gets bound to your certificate, and the signing details get stored in sigstore’s trust root, the deeper layer of keys and trustees and what we use to check authenticity.

https://github.com/sigstore/cosign

> our certificate then comes back to sigstore, where sigstore exchanges keys, asserts your identity and signs everything off. The signature contains the hash itself, public key, signature content and the time stamp. This all gets uploaded to a Rekor transparency log, so anyone can check that what you’ve put out there went through all the checks needed to be authentic.

https://github.com/sigstore/rekor

fulcio is a root CA for code signing certs. Its job is to issue code-signing certificates and to embed OIDC identity into code-signing certificate. From this description we can see that it performs these tasks in steps 2, 3, 4 and 8.

Did you follow the link to the project list on Github? The actual tool for doing the signing, cosign, is just a binary you can install on your device and generate signatures and keys yourself. The "service" part of it seems to just be having your public certificate vouched for by a trusted code signing CA. I don't see anything in the tooling that requires your users to only trust that CA. If you want to sign your cert with your own CA and tell your users to trust that instead, they seemingly can do that, just as you can do that today in browsers. That you can't do it with Firefox extensions and mobile app stores is a limitation intentionally built into the distribution channel. It's not a limitation of PKI itself. iOS, Android, and Mozilla could have chosen to let users install arbitrary trusted CAs. You shouldn't dismiss all PKI based on the fact that a few vendors have chosen to implement it in a crappy way to make walled gardens.

It doesn't say this on the announcement, but looking at the actual PKI service (https://github.com/sigstore/fulcio), it seems to be entirely possible to self-host the service and roll your own CA.

In other cases it may be more documented, such as Golangs baked-in telemetry.

There should be better ways to check these problems. The best I have found so far is Crev https://github.com/crev-dev/crev/. It's most used implementation is Cargo-crev https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev, but hopefully it will become more required to use these types of tools. Certainty and metrics about how many eyes have been on a particular script, and what expertise they have would be a huge win for software.

The main problem the author is talking about is actually about version updates, which in Maven as well as crates.io is up to each lib's author, and is not curated in any way.

There's no technical solution to that, really. Do you think Nexus Firewall can pick up every exploit, or even most? How confident of that are you, and what data do you have to back that up? I don't have any myself, but would not be surprised at all if "hackers" can easily work around their scanning.

However, I don't have a better approach than using scanning tools like Nexus, or as the author proposes, use a curated library repository like Debian is doing (which hopefully gets enough eyeballs to remain secure) or the https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev project (manually reviewed code) also mentioned. It's interesting that they mention C/C++ just rely on distros providing dynamic libs instead which means you don't even control your dependencies versions, some distro does (how reliable is the distro?)... I wonder if that could work for other languages or if it's just as painful as it looks in the C world.

For instance, the worst company imaginable may be in charge of software that was once FOSS, and they may change absolutely nothing about it, so it should be fine. However, if a small update is added that does something bad, you should know about it immediately.

The solution seems to be much more clearly in the realm of things like crev: https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev/

Wherein users can get a clear picture of what dependencies are used in the full chain, and how they have been independently reviewed for security and privacy. That's the real solution for the future. A quick score that is available upon display everytime you upgrade, with large warnings for anything above a certain threshold.

The metrics on crates.io are a useful sniff test, but ultimately you need to review things yourself, or trust some contributors and reviewers. Some projects, like cargo crev or cargo vet can help with the process.

You can use cargo-geiger or cargo-crev to check for whether people you trusted (e.g. u/jonhoo ) trust this crate.

There is a similar idea being explored with https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev - you trust a reviewer who reviews crates for trustworthiness, as well as other reviewers.

[cargo-crev](https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev) looks like a good step in the right direction but not really commonly used.

'cargo crev' makes this kind of workflow possible: https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev

The crev folks themselves are no fans of PGP but need a way to security identify that you are in fact the review author, so that's where the id generation comes in. Ultimately crev is just a bunch of repos with text files you sign with IDs. The nice property is that you can chain these together into a web of trust and it's unfortunate that vet doesn't just use the same signed files on repos model as a foundation because even if they don't trust anyone else, we could turn around and trust them.