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Social engineering takeovers of open source projects

openssf.org

331–340 of 379 posts

Re: Social engineering takeovers of open source projects

#331
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m reading all this with sadness realizing that one of the Internet’s last remaining high trust spaces is being destroyed.

> one of the Internet’s last remaining high trust spaces is being destroyed One of the Internet's last remaining high trust spaces is being attacked . What happens next is still unwritten.

From what I know of today's developer culture the solution will be for one company, probably Microsoft given their ownership of GitHub, to step in and become undisputed king and single point of failure for all open source development. Developers will say this is great and will happily invite this, with security people repeating mantras about how securing things is "hard" and "Microsoft has more security personnel than we do." Then MS will own the whole ecosystem. Anyone objecting will be called old or a paranoid nut. "This is how we do things now."

Re: Social engineering takeovers of open source projects

#332
> Pay attention to how interactions make you feel. Interactions that create self-doubt, feelings of inadequacy, of not doing enough for the project, etc. might be part of a social engineering attack.

Thus all ungrateful tickets whining about the project maintainers' lack of activity or brow beating then into action must be seen as a threat. How interesting.

Re: Social engineering takeovers of open source projects

#333
post #22

I'm a maintainer (one of many) of an open source project, and this topic has been on my mind a lot lately as I review PRs. I am more suspicious of PRs from new contributors by default now. Of course I keep these suspicions to myself, but besides simply reviewing code for all the regular things, I now ask myself "what sort of sneaky thing could they be doing that appears benign on the surface?"

This should be the mindset for any commit. I mean, they could add something benign unknowingly. Something could hack their account, or abuse a flaw in your commit-system to appear as someone else. They could have a melt-down, or strange ideas and adding something for nonsical reasons. Shit can happen all the time from all directions for any reason.

Re: Social engineering takeovers of open source projects

#334
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. My team still favors batteries-included style systems, even if it means missing out on the latest thing all the cool kids on the internet are talking about. For languages, this usually means sticking with the standard library that ships with it along with one or two libraries that augment it (e.g., BOOST for C++). It's not like "batteries included" eliminates the problem - a bad actor can wander in there and caus…

in open source you rarely have the cohesion of a full team to NIH all the stuff that you could pull in libraries for...

The swan, the pike, and the crawfish.

Re: Social engineering takeovers of open source projects

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia, China, Iran and NK cock-block development for years, because the MR “doesn’t represent their interests”.

You mean like the US blocks all efforts to ban putting weapons in space?

[flagged]

Re: Social engineering takeovers of open source projects

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US gov has encouraged finance/tech industry to invest in the security of OSS supply chains. OpenSSF members: https://openssf.org/about/members 2021, $10MM, https://openssf.org/press-release/2021/10/13/open-source-sec... > Financial commitments from Premier members include Amazon, Cisco, Dell Technologies, Ericsson, Facebook, Fidelity, GitHub, Google, IBM, Intel, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Oracle, Red…

Why did Eclipse org get so much and Apache org none/less? In my experience, the footprint of Apache exceeds anything else in enterprise programming.

I expect the pay awards are based on the various OSS foundation thingies lobbying.

But protecting dev environments makes sense. Think how many supply chains an attacker can compromise if they can get at random dumb developer machines...

Re: Social engineering takeovers of open source projects

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not on any third party system, where you're locked out forever if you lose your second factor. Every two-factor system I've ever seen is actually two-of-three, with an account recovery code that you save elsewhere. I lost all my two-factor auths when my phone got wrecked, it was annoying to reestablish access to those accounts (and I now use a TOTP client which backs the tokesn up), but it was tedious rather than d…

> and I now use a TOTP client which backs the tokens up What are some good options for this? I think my ideal solution would export an encrypted file, a bit like KeePass does on the desktop, but I don't know of many mobile apps for that.

I use FreeOTP for iOS.

It has two security levels: normal-level security codes will unlock when the phone is unlocked, high-level security codes require a separate unlock to get the code. The former back up to iCloud (E2E encrypted), the latter don't back up.

Re: Social engineering takeovers of open source projects

#339
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not on any third party system, where you're locked out forever if you lose your second factor. Every two-factor system I've ever seen is actually two-of-three, with an account recovery code that you save elsewhere. I lost all my two-factor auths when my phone got wrecked, it was annoying to reestablish access to those accounts (and I now use a TOTP client which backs the tokesn up), but it was tedious rather than d…

It was not difficult because you actually had the recovery codes. How many people have them? Also you're supposed to print them. Where? How many people own a printer? If you print them in a shop they can be considered compromised.

We're talking about software developers, right?

I would hope that when a software dev sees a widget that says "these are your recovery codes, write them down or copy them to a secure location or you may lose access to your account", they do exactly that.

Except for codes which protect my money (which go onto paper, which goes in a safe), I put them in a password vault. TOTP offers protection against getting shoulder-surfed, key logged, or phished, it isn't much protection if Mallory gets access to my entire password vault. YMMV.

Re: Social engineering takeovers of open source projects

#340
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one of the Internet’s last remaining high trust spaces is being destroyed One of the Internet's last remaining high trust spaces is being attacked . What happens next is still unwritten.

From what I know of today's developer culture the solution will be for one company, probably Microsoft given their ownership of GitHub, to step in and become undisputed king and single point of failure for all open source development. Developers will say this is great and will happily invite this, with security people repeating mantras about how securing things is "hard" and "Microsoft has more security personnel tha…

As an positive counterexample, US recently reduced federal funding for the program which manages CVEs [1]. There was/is risk of CVE data becoming pay-for-play, but OSS developers have also pushed for decentralization [2]. A recent announcement is moving in the right direction, https://medium.com/@cve_program/new-cve-record-format-enable...

  The CVE Board is proud to announce that the CVE Program has evolved its record format to enhance automation capabilities and data enrichment. This format, utilized by CVE Services, facilitates the reservation of CVE IDs and the inclusion of data elements like CVSS, CWE, CPE, and other data into the CVE Record at the time of issuing a security advisory. This means the authoritative source (within their CNA scope) of vulnerability information — those closest to the products themselves — can accurately report enriched data to CVE directly and contribute more substantially to the vulnerability management process.
> solution will be for one company, probably Microsoft given their ownership of GitHub, to step in and become undisputed king and single point of failure for all open source development.

A single vendor solution would be unacceptable to peer competitors who also depend on open-source software. A single-foundation (like LF) solution would also be sub-optimal, but at least it would be multi-vendor. Long term, we'll need a decentralized protocol for collaborative development, perhaps derived from social media protocols which support competing sources of moderation and annotation.

In the meantime, one way to decentralize Github's social features is to use the GH CLI to continually export community content (e.g. issue history) as text that can be committed to a git repository for replication. Supply chain security and identity metadata can be then be layered onto collaboration data.

[1] https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities-threats/nist-nee...

[2] https://github.com/yoctoproject/cve-cna-open-letter/blob/mai...

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