On Fri, May 27, 2022 at 9:40 AM Skip Montanaro <skip.montan...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> > Takeover of the ctx project was reported on multiple channels overnight
> and was mitigated as of 6:07 AM Eastern.
>
> Ee,
>
> Thanks for the quick action by the Python infrastructure and security
> teams. I don't normally dig into such things, but was curious. I found
> the incident report clear, and since the exploit was very simple and
> written in Python, I actually understood it. (Many hacks these days
> seem obscure, especially stuff involving buffer overruns or
> use-after-free.)
>
> But I digress. Reading the report raised a couple questions for me.
>
> 1. Would requiring 2FA for all PyPI accounts be reasonable?
>

Because both GitHub (
https://github.blog/2022-05-04-software-security-starts-with-the-developer-securing-developer-accounts-with-2fa/)
and npm (
https://github.blog/2022-05-04-software-security-starts-with-the-developer-securing-developer-accounts-with-2fa/)
will be requiring 2FA in the future, so we are not trailblazing here. The
attackers are unfortunately too relentless and vast to leave PyPI alone.
Add in the fact that Python packaging does not lock Python versions and
require hash verification (at least for now; I'm still trying to get this
rectified), this problem will persist.


>
> 2. This might seem odd, but would it also be reasonable to require
> accounts to be associated with a large, well-known email service
> provider?
>

Speaking as someone sending from a personal email address, the answer is
no. 😉 That might protect folks from re-registering a dead domain, but it
doesn't protect against people phishing a password.


>
> That second one would seem to be pretty debatable, but the odds of,
> say, gmail.com or outlook.com, expiring and being re-registered would
> seem pretty slim. It's much more likely that an individual's account
> would simply be hacked. Hmmm... Maybe I should just retract that idea.
>

Slim, but it's happened:
https://whoapi.com/blog/5-all-time-domain-expirations-in-internets-history/
.

-Brett


>
> I think #1 might help, however.
>
> Again, thanks...
>
> Skip Montanaro
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