Woodruff: You shouldn't trust trusted publishing

William Woodruff, better known online as "yossarian", has published a blog post to make the case that users should not place their trust in trusted publishing:

Trusted Publishing is a mechanism for establishing trust between an external machine identity (like a CI/CD workflow) and one or more projects on a package index/registry. The "trust" in "Trusted Publishing" refers to that trust relationship, and not to anything else.

It is not, and cannot be, a signal for package trust or quality. You cannot use it to determine whether a package is safe or "good," and PyPI consciously stymies attempts to misuse it for that purpose by not rendering it as a "green checkmark" or anything else of the sort.

Or as another framing: Trusted Publishing is just a form of authentication. It doesn't tell you anything other than that an upload was authenticated, which all uploads to PyPI are.

LWN covered trusted publishing in June.

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