this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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Gitlab is open source. You can download it and host it yourself. A decentralized developer community is resilient against this sort of attack for the very reason GitHub is so vulnerable: size.
Git was always designed with decentralized development and collaboration in mind. Its creator, Linus Torvalds, prefers not to bother with servers like GitHub at all. Git can even be used entirely over email (Linus’s preference)!
No, it's not. Not in literally any way. Not 1%. Not 0.000000000000000001%. You don't even get security by obscurity as a nebulous benefit because the core mechanisms are basically the same between instances.
No projects are being compromised. They're being imitated and passed off as the real thing to the naive. You can just as easily do that on another server (including established ones by adding multiple domains to your scripts) when people expect to use thousands of different git hosts as you can on GitHub, except without the benefit of the scale of Microsoft's expertise at handling this type of attack.
I'm all for federated git being the way forward. I'd love to see it grow into a reasonable option. But it has no benefit in any context against an attack like this.
a decentralized community that correctly prioritizes security would absolutely be using signed commits and other web-of-trust security practices to prevent this sort of problem
New accounts exist and have good reason to exist. You can't and shouldn't ban new accounts from creating projects.
Anyone capable of understanding what "web of trust" means is already way too sophisticated to be misled by these fake projects.
Um, what? Sorry but if someone is going to send, say, ten million malicious contributions (or heck, even just one), I don't particularly want to deal with that on my self hosted server. I'd rather someone else deal with it.
The Linux project created Git to solve problems they had. Pretty much no other project in the world has the same set of problems - it's a highly unusual open source project with tens of millions in market value. Other projects have very different needs.