alt Hacker NewsNo. I was one of the "lucky" ones forced to use 2FA from the beginning.
I also wrote the twine manpage (in debian) because at the time there was even no way of knowing how to publish at all.
Basically you enable 2FA on your account, go on the website, generate a token, store it in a .txt file and use that for the rest of your life without having to use 2FA ever again.
I had originally thought you'd need your 2FA every upload but that's not how it works.
Then they have the trusted publisher thing (which doesn't and won't work with codeberg) where they just upload whatever comes from github's runners. Of course if the developer's token.txt got compromised, there's a chance also his private ssh key to push on github got compromised and the attackers can push something that will end up on pypi anyway.
Remember that trusted publishing replaces GPG signatures, so the one thing that required unlocking the private key with a passphrase is no longer used.
python.org has also stopped signing their releases with GPG in favour to sigstore, which is another 3rd party signing scheme somewhat similar to trusted publisher.
edit: They deny this but my suspicion is that eventually tokens won't be supported and trusted publishing will be the only way to publish on pypi, locking projects out of using codeberg and whatever other non-major forge they might wish to use.
Replies
I’ll bypass the technical inaccuracies in this comment to focus on the main important thing.
> Then they have the trusted publisher thing (which doesn't and won't work with codeberg) where they just upload whatever comes from github's runners.
There’s no particular reason it wouldn’t work; it’s just OIDC and Codeberg could easily stand up an IdP. If you’re willing to put the effort into making this happen, I’d be happy (as I’ve said before) to review any contributions towards this end.
(The only thing that won’t work here is imputing malicious intent; that makes it seem like you have a score to settle rather than a genuine technical interest in the community.)
A stolen PyPI token was uses for the compromized litellm package. I wouldn't be surprized if tokens will be decommissioned in the aftermath of these recent hijackings. That wouldn't prevent these attacks as you mentioned SSH keys were stolen (and a Github token in the case of litellm). It would be a way for PyPA to brush off liability without securing anything.