git-ts VS vouch

I wrote a tool a long time ago to publish a tree of git sha's to a neat non-distributed pre-blockchain that was being supported by the Linux Foundation, publictimestamp.org

https://github.com/rektide/git-ts

Alas frigging publictimestamp.krg was a pretty basic site which was fully dynically rendered. Nine of web.archive.org leaves any evidence of what the public timestamping (centralized) blockchain was anymore. Terrible bitrot, ironically for a.project that was all about preserving histor That's a real bite in the ass by irony!

a long time ago i wrote https://github.com/rektide/git-ts , which posted git commit checksums to https://publictimestamp.org, which was a public service one could submit hashes to which would attest to them. hosted by linux foundation for a while. i really wish the website were still up to explain the project, even if it's offline. i loved having a way to say- yes, this commit is indeed from when it says it was.

there'a a ton of attestation stuff going on in cloud land these days, often under lofty objectives like "supply chain security".

If you don't know the author, signatures do nothing. Anybody can sign their package with some key. Even if you could check the author's identity, that still does very little for you, unless you know them personally.

It makes a lot more sense to use cryptography to verify that releases are not malicious directly. Tools like crev [1], vouch [2], and cargo-vet [3] allow you to trust your colleagues or specific people to review packages before you install them. That way you don't have to trust their authors or package repositories at all.

That seems like a much more viable path forward than expecting package repositories to audit packages or trying to assign trust onto random developers.

[1]: https://github.com/crev-dev/crev [2]: https://github.com/vouch-dev/vouch [3]: https://github.com/mozilla/cargo-vet

Alternatives to cargo-vet that has been mentioned before here on HN:

- https://github.com/crev-dev/crev

- https://github.com/vouch-dev/vouch

Anyone know of any more alternatives or similar tools already available?

I've created Vouch in an attempt to address this problem:

https://github.com/vouch-dev/vouch

Vouch lets users create and share reviews for NPM packages. Project dependencies can then be checked against those reviews.

Vouch uses extensions to interface with package ecosystems. It's simple to create a new extension. Extensions currently exist for NPM, PyPi, and Ansible Galaxy.

I'm currently working on a website to index known reviews and publish official reviews.

I hope you guys find it useful! Drop by the Matrix channel if you have any feedback to share: #vouch:matrix.org