text stringlengths 0 2.67k |
|---|
**Autumn Nash:** That's what I'm saying, I think that's kind of cool, because when you're scoping projects, and you're looking for tools to use, that would be a great research tool. |
**Justin Garrison:** And you mentioned you can run the tool on any repo. It's a command line tool, it runs in a GitHub action... What sort of permission does it need on the repo itself? Because you said it will look for things like protected main branch. Is that something that it's calling the GitHub API for, or is it ... |
**Chris Swan:** So it is making use of the GitHub API. And for open source repos, you can actually see that stuff. So you can see aspects of the GitHub config, even though to change that config you would need to be an administrator. |
**Justin Garrison:** Right. You have read-only access, and that's what the scorecard needs. |
**Chris Swan:** Yes. |
**Justin Garrison:** And you mentioned earlier that you started seeing it on Flutter repos. Is that where it's mainly being used? Or where are you actually seeing it being implemented in different projects and groups? |
**Chris Swan:** The energy seems to have originated from Google, but I think it's already spread out quite widely from there. So for instance, Intel have now got a very mature open source organization. The leader there, Arun Gupta, he's now the Chair of OpenSSF. But Arun is somebody that's kind of moved around the indu... |
\[26:12\] But behind Arun, the team at Intel are kind of busily working their way through thousands of open source repos that they've got, implementing Scorecard. That's just an example of a large organization, with a big open source presence, deciding to adopt it, and committing themselves to the process of a) impleme... |
**Justin Garrison:** Are Scorecards versioned at all? It's just a kind of question, if "Hey, today you're a green badge, you're an eight." Things change over time, and practices change, and in two to three years from now, I'm assuming what got you an eight today is not going to get you an eight in 2027. So do they vers... |
**Chris Swan:** So being an open source project itself, Scorecard is constantly improving. And one of the side effects of that is your eight today is not guaranteed to be an eight tomorrow. Because the things that are being measured may move under your feet, so new things might be introduced. Hopefully, it means that m... |
**Autumn Nash:** I think that's really cool, because I think people only think about security when something goes wrong... And the fact that more and more people are I feel like championing open source, but maybe it is harder when people are all working for different companies, and beginning people trying to learn how ... |
**Chris Swan:** It does. And I think it introduces a new set of norms about how projects are expected to work. So if we look at contributing to open source, it can be a very uneven process at the moment. Every different open source project has got a different set of customs, a different approach to doing continuous int... |
**Autumn Nash:** \[30:12\] That's a really good perspective. |
**Justin Garrison:** I do want to give a little bit an idea here for people that are \[unintelligible 00:30:14.18\] I literally just downloaded and installed the CLI, and ran it against -- I have a Bash scheduler for Kubernetes. It's written in Bash, it's like 100 lines of Bash, and I ran it. I'm like "What is my score... |
And contributors is another one, which is an interesting thought for how does something become secure with contributors. And in this case, in just the CLI output, it says "How many different organizations have contributed to this repo?" And my Bash repo has four different organizations; four different people have contr... |
**Chris Swan:** Yeah, some of the checks are really binary. You either pass them or fail them. But others are very much more on some kind of spectrum. So one of the checks is OpenSSF best practices, and you might see it there as CII best practices... Which is this huge questionnaire which feels to me like it's somewhat... |
**Justin Garrison:** And zero if you haven't tried anything. |
**Chris Swan:** And zero if you haven't even started. But I think you can get a three for being in progress. So if you've completed a bunch of the questionnaire, you're not passing yet, but at least you're trying to get there. |
**Justin Garrison:** It's interesting here seeing just what is -- because I don't have a license file in this repo... Which I should. I generally put license files. But I don't have a license file. So it's a zero. Fuzzing - zero. Maintained - zero. But I also have no packaging... There's no binary, so I have no Binary ... |
So it's interesting, because you could - I don't wanna say you could game this, but I could not run this on certain things to make sure like "You know, I don't want to have to deal with that right now." I mean, just as you were saying, to get this eight score... I could pick and choose the things that are going to get ... |
**Chris Swan:** So gaming's an interesting aspect to this. One challenge for us was docs repos. How do you do a CI against a docs repo? What sort of testing should you be doing there? And you have to be a little bit creative with it. So what we've ended up doing in that particular case is we have a Markdown linter as o... |
**Autumn Nash:** \[34:20\] I also really think that maybe this could be a gateway into contributing to open source, because when you first start wanting to contribute to open source, you're like "Well, what do I even contribute? How do I even...? And the fact that something as simple as fixing docs, or linting stuff, o... |
There's a lot of debate about how to get into open source right now, and how to do your first contribution... So maybe Scorecard gives not only that best practices that we start to learn, but also is a new way for the next generation of people that want to contribute to open source, and then they can start that journey... |
**Chris Swan:** Yeah. And I always encourage people to start with their documentation PRs. And I think it's so frequently the case that the creator of a project, and especially sort of a small project - it worked on their environment, and they've tried to document it as they think somebody needs to for using it. But yo... |
**Autumn Nash:** That's such a good thought too, because how many times have you tried a project or done something, and then it doesn't work the way that you think it is, and it's so frustrating? But that's really an opportunity to, for one, make better software for the next person, but it'd also be that contribution t... |
**Chris Swan:** Yeah, we've done Hacktoberfest for the last few years, and it was a bit different this past year, because of the not giving away T-shirts anymore. I saw less activity as a result of that. |
**Justin Garrison:** I didn't know they stopped the T-shirts. |
**Chris Swan:** Yeah, it was kind of positioned as being a sustainability thing. They didn't want to be using all the cotton, and mailing the T-shirts all over the world. But I did like the T-shirts, even though they gave people options previously to have a tree-planted instead. I chose the T-shirt. But past years, I'v... |
**Autumn Nash:** I feel like having good documentation is so underrated, and it helps people to use your product. You can have the best product ever, but if it's hard to use, people aren't going to use it. So I felt like people should appreciate people that write good documentation, and add to documentation, because li... |
**Justin Garrison:** It's context, right? It is that "How much do I need to know ahead of learning this?" And there's a lot of assumptions in various language programming, and stuff like that... It's just like "Oh, well, you're learning Ruby on Rails, o you must know Ruby, right?" It's like "Well, maybe I'm a beginner.... |
\[38:10\] A lot of times I've helped people that were getting into tech, and they're like "I don't know what the command line is. I don't know where I'm typing and what I'm doing." I'm like "Okay, well, let's start at the very basics of what is a command line. And not assume you know what even a command, and output, an... |
Let's figure out how much context is relevant to what we're trying to do, and where are people starting? And trying to bring people into that. And so I do think that it's interesting taking this scorecard approach of "How do we get someone to contribute to open source?", especially from cybersecurity. Because people ar... |
**Autumn Nash:** And every job is like "You need three years of experience." But how...? |
**Justin Garrison:** Exactly. And being able to give them this starting point of "Here's some things that are generally best practices, and we say you have to have, or should have these things", like pinned dependencies. Even if they don't know "Why do I need a pinned dependency? How does that help with security?" It d... |
**Autumn Nash:** But also, that's a jumping point for someone to go down that rabbit hole and go learn about stuff. "Oh, this thing is -- I can fix this. Now let me go figure out what it is, and then google it, and then learn about it." And then when they fix it, you're gonna remember that more than if you just googled... |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah, and giving someone new a place to start with how to do something, not why, sometimes is important. Because you just need to like "I just need to try it first. I need to do something." And then I go back and figure out "Oh, why did I do that? What was that relevant to? Why did that matter?" |
**Autumn Nash:** Also, I gained confidence. I think a lot of times in tech you spend all this time researching and doing theory and learning classes, but the actual -- I think people, especially women already have impostor syndrome, and I feel like when you get to actually go and solve a problem and do things, it helps... |
**Justin Garrison:** Chris, you were mentioning early on that OpenSSF is about securing the supply chain of software. How does this specifically -- how do Scorecards tie into that? Why is this an important piece of a supply chain? Because supply chains are generally hashes built on hashes, that are secure to like "No, ... |
**Chris Swan:** It's a piece to the puzzle. And if you go and take a look at OpenSSF, then there's a whole bunch of other projects there which are related to how we have things flowing through the software supply chain, and how we can attest to the security of them, and measure that. So things like software bill of mat... |
\[41:58\] Dependencies are changing under our feet at a frightening pace. Something like Python Cryptography - I think I've seen four bumps to that in the last week or so... And it's followed a pattern of -- so there's been two CVEs, where it's become a known vulnerability to be stuck on the old version, because there'... |
The other way it kind of relates to the supply chain is what Autumn was talking about earlier - as you're choosing things that you're going to depend on, if you're seeing the scorecard there, then that's giving you a measure of the quality of attention being paid to security in that project. And so if you do have a cho... |
**Justin Garrison:** You mentioned a couple of things there, on this being a piece of the puzzle, where looking at this test output I don't see anything about signed artifacts, and I don't see anything about some of those other things that are more downstream, because this is focused strictly on the repository, how's t... |
**Chris Swan:** So signed artifacts is absolutely one of the checks. And this is a little tool that got published in the last week or so from one of the Linux Foundation folk, where you can point it at your scorecard and it'll show you a radar plot of the different scores and where they came from. And so signed artifac... |
So things like Python artifact signing is actually at the maturity where it's worth doing, and somebody might actually be implementing checking the signatures... But something like Dart - that's less of a thing in that ecosystem at the moment. So not quite as relevant. |
Yeah, if we kind of look at both sides of it here, are you looking at the dependencies coming in and the quality of those, and then you're looking at what you're creating and how that might be somebody else's dependency, and the level of assurance that you can pass into that next link in the chain. |
**Justin Garrison:** And I probably don't have any sort of signing in my output, because I have no artifacts, I'm guessing... We can skip over some of those tests if we're not actually consuming, or -- yeah, it's like "Yeah, let's not run that." |
**Autumn Nash:** I also think that's interesting though, because especially when - they always say that startups and innovations and new things are built when tech is in a downturn. And I wonder if things like this, where we're talking about best practices and how you said there's no mature tool on the other side - I w... |
**Chris Swan:** \[45:53\] There's so much happening in that space at the moment. And it all, to an extent, flows from an executive order. And I know there was many years of work done by some dedicated practitioners in the security space to get to the executive order in the first place. But now there's an executive orde... |
And I think sophisticated organizations are already starting to implement processes and tools around consuming that stuff... But it is so early days. So for the bulk of the industry, it's going to be years before this is commonplace. But it will come, and there's a whole bunch of work to be done to make it happen acros... |
**Justin Garrison:** I think what you were mentioning before too, where this isn't all positive things necessarily. This does add more toil, this does add more things that you have to maintain... And you shouldn't jump into that toil until you need it, or are required to have it sometimes, where it's like "Hey, if I'm ... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.