gitsign VS cargo-vet

> does it also filter/escape ANSI Sequences in messages and author names?

Not at present! Do you have a link or so I could use to familiarize myself? I'm curious if it'd fall within gittuf's scope.

> does it block garbage collection?

Nope, it doesn't. That said, the repository will have more objects, gittuf tracks additional objects through custom refs in `refs/gittuf/`.

> how do you ensure that the developers are really the developers and there's no spoofing?

At present, gittuf policies use signing keys. It doesn't rely on the commit metadata for author and committer but rather the commit's signature. We support GPG and Sigstore's gitsign [0] right now, and we want to support other signing mechanisms like SSH keys as well.

[0] https://github.com/sigstore/gitsign

You may want to check out https://github.com/sigstore/gitsign! You can generate ephemeral x509 code signing certs for free using Sigstore.

(disclosure: I'm a maintainer for gitsign)

Def check out the gitsign project mentioned in the post: https://github.com/sigstore/gitsign

Gitsign offers a keyless commit signing implementation based on OIDC, which is an identity layer built on top of the OAuth 2.0 framework. Gitsign supports verifying your identity either through GitHub, Microsoft, or a Google account.

Shameless plug for the gitsign project in sigstore: https://github.com/sigstore/gitsign

This isn't supported by GitHub yet but we're hopefully working towards that too.

We used to actually run an RFC3161 timestamp server in addition to the transparency log but recently turned it down because no one was using it. I'd like to bring it back for stuff like this.

https://github.com/sigstore/gitsign/issues/22

For supply chain security, you might be interested in cargo-vet[0], a tool for coordinating and requiring manual reviews of open source dependencies. Both Mozilla and Google[1] have started publishing their audits.toml files, which are a machine-readable file describing what source code reviews they have performed.

[0] https://github.com/mozilla/cargo-vet

[1] https://opensource.googleblog.com/2023/05/open-sourcing-our-...

there is also cargo-vet for manual auditing of the source code of the crates, which is not something that can be done automatically. Quite a few companies and orgs use it now like Mozilla, Google, Bytecode Alliance, us (Embark Studios), ISRG, zcash etc. And believe its usage will expand significantly going forward with corporate users and security sensitive projects/orgs.

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

The other approach is https://github.com/mozilla/cargo-vet

cargo crev and cargo vet for reviewing dependencies and using reviewed versions

Since the audits are designed to be used at a per project level and contributed directly into the VCS repo (allowing you to using git signing for example) I don't quite understand what additional off-line cryptographic signatures are required here (considering that Cargo's lockfiles already contain a hash of the crate which would prevent the project from getting an altered version of a crate accidentally and that SHA validation is being considered as part of vet as well https://github.com/mozilla/cargo-vet/issues/116).