PyPI Requires 2FA for New User Registrations

https://blog.pypi.org/posts/2023-08-08-2fa-enforcement-for-new-users/

by miketheman • 3 years ago

112 73 3 years ago

blog.pypi.org

Hey Mike, can you support renaming secure authenticators (Two factor methods)? Github is a great example wrt UX around this specific experience: https://github.blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/key_list.png?... (from https://github.blog/2023-07-12-introducing-passwordless-auth...).

Appreciate the efforts to secure the software supply chain!

miketheman6• 3 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion!

The image you showed is in regards to Passkeys, which PyPI doesn't support yet.

For TOTP, we support a single entry, and can't set a custom name.

For WebAuthn, we allow a custom label value, is that what you're looking for?

toomuchtodo2• 3 years ago

For WebAuthn, we allow a custom label value, is that what you're looking for?

Yep! I don't see that option, but I'm probably just missing it. Thank you for the reply!

samcat116• 3 years ago

Hopefully they support Passkeys sometime soon.

miketheman6• 3 years ago

Turns out we already do! When setting up 2FA, select WebAuthN and create a label for your device. When prompted, follow directions on your device.

woodruffw5• 3 years ago

This has been a long time coming, and will keep PyPI closely aligned with improving practices on the source host side as well[1].

[1] https://github.blog/2023-03-09-raising-the-bar-for-software-...

jjgreen4• 3 years ago

I see the list of "management actions" does not explicitly include project or account deletion (after 2FA imposed), anyone know if those will be included?

miketheman6• 3 years ago

Project deletion would fall under "management".

Account deletion is excluded so you can elect to remove your account at any time.

jjgreen4• 3 years ago

Thanks -- but if you are the sole owner of project, what happens to those projects after account deletion? Some kind of orphan status?

thewataccount• 3 years ago

Any chance of signed builds returning? It's bizarre to me that we would move _away_ from signed builds.

2FA means we can trust the person that logged in - but we still don't trust that PyPI is being honest (no offense).

miketheman6• 3 years ago

None taken :)

PEP 458 describes the path forward for PyPI. https://peps.python.org/pep-0458/

Here's the in-progress roadmap: https://github.com/pypi/warehouse/issues/10672

If there's particular issues you believe you could pick off to help achieve the goal, much appreciated!

zimmerfrei• 3 years ago

That is not really a big improvement, as it just covers the threat of compromise for the CDN and any of proxies, but not of the PiPI infra itself.

That is covered by PEP 480, which is already 9 years old:

https://peps.python.org/pep-0480/

Too bad that PyPI (and pip) effectively killed PGP signatures under control of the developers (therefore truly end to end) even with the simple TOFU model, and without providing an alternative.

woodruffw5• 3 years ago

Any chance of signed builds returning? It's bizarre to me that we would move _away_ from signed builds.

PyPI never supported "signed builds" in the first place. What it had was vestigial support for attaching PGP signatures to distributions; without a key or identity distribution mechanism, these signatures were virtually useless (and all public evidence indicates that they were, consequently, virtually unused).

Note that attached signatures alone don't prevent dishonesty on PyPI's part: without identity pinning, a dishonest PyPI could replace a correctly signed distribution Foo with a correctly signed (and easily exploitable) distribution Bar during a user's retrieval. Every signature needs to be bound to both the distribution's content and its distribution name by some stable discoverable identity.

arnon3• 3 years ago

PyPi let an old employer take over my account and hasn't been responding for nearly two years.

They told me they'd investigate but have been ghosting me since. I sent several requests to have my account restored but they just won't answer.

miketheman6• 3 years ago

So sorry to hear that. I looked at our account recovery requests repo and didn't see anything from `arnon` or similar usernames.

We have the published account recovery process here: https://pypi.org/help/#account-recovery

Is that the process you've followed?

arnon3• 3 years ago

They reset my password and then changed the e-mail. The username remains the same and it is "arnon".

I tried re-registering now to check your claim but it says the username is under use and I can't restore the password for it since they changed the e-mail to one of theirs.

The last communication I got from PyPi was from Ee Durbin in 2022 saying:

Given this, it appears that someone from <redacted> utilized the @<redacted>.com email address associated with the account to take it over and obtain access to the <redacted> libraries that the arnon User owned.
We are discussing next steps internally.
-Ee Durbin
Director of Infrastructure
Python Software Foundation

I've asked a couple of times for status updates as recently as this July and haven't heard back.

nightshift12• 3 years ago

Why is the 2fa rollout going at such a glacial pace ? In July last year it was announced that the top 1% projects contributors had to use 2fa. It it because of pushback from the developpers, or maybe because it is not as easy it it seems ? I'm just curious, I am in now way involved in this.

woodruffw5• 3 years ago

2FA itself has been deployed and available on PyPI for years, and has seen a decent amount of adoption. That part hasn't been glacial :-)

Mandatory 2FA, on the other hand, is a little thorny: the Python packaging ecosystem has a lot of very popular, very stable packages that receive relatively few updates, meaning that it takes a long time to onboard those maintainers (without risking locking them out of their accounts or their abilities to do rapid security releases).

Now that GitHub is mandating 2FA, however, the argument for slow-walking it becomes much weaker: the overwhelming majority of maintainers will need to enable 2FA anyways to make changes to their codebases, so PyPI can effectively "hitch" onto that wave and do a mandate at the same time.

TL;DR: Moving hundreds of thousands of users to a mandatory 2FA scheme is relatively disruptive; the circumstances have aligned such that doing so now is minimally disruptive.

nightshift12• 3 years ago

Interesting, I kinda understand since I work for a big org where everything is very slow because of bureaucracy and fear of changes but here the big projects were already forced to use 2fa. It would seem logical to force the contributors to use good security practices right from the start. I would have probably started with those.

Anyway, I don't want to complain. I believe its a good step towards securing the software supply chain.

Keep up the good work.

superq• 3 years ago

unpopular thought perhaps, but with this many companies/teams mandating MFA (especially to technical people, who should already know how to create secure passwords, not use them on more than one site, not spread them around, etc):

The pressure of all of these MFA inputs, especially for products that expire them even on a trusted device/browser, is eventually going to push people into the arms of convenient "password managers".

This will effectively nullify the 'something you have' in MFA because it'll all be available on your one single device again.

Even worse, it'll present multiple high-value targets now, from the centralized server/sync side (ie lastpass) down to individual devices.

Put another way: if you're storing the passwords in the same place as the MFA secrets, then it's not actually MFA anymore.

It's not that PyPI is wrong to do this, it's that the weight of everyone mandating MFA will eventually either push people away or force them to work around draconian or onerous security requirements.

mplewis• 3 years ago

When someone stores their MFA credential in a password manager, that only means that in the worst case, they are as insecure as someone with no MFA – right?

This doesn't seem like a big problem to me for two reasons:

1. if they're using a password manager, they are likely to be using a better password

2. it's much more likely that someone has intercepted a single static password for a single website than, say, your 1Password vault password AND username AND secret key

saithound• 3 years ago

When someone stores their MFA credential in a password manager, that only means that in the worst case, they are as insecure as someone with no MFA – right?

Even if this was right (which I don't think it is under the threat model described by the OP: they claim, rightpy or wrongly, that the attack surface somehow increases when everybody adopts MFA), consider the protocol where you have to enter your password and cut off a lock of hair to authenticate. In the worst case, this is as insecure as someone who just enters their password without any hair cutting, but doesn't mean that adopting it would not be a big problem, or even a good thing overall (at the very least it would massively inconvenience bald people; there are parallels, it's not like MFA does not inconvenience certain people).

xavdid• 3 years ago

if you're storing the passwords in the same place as the MFA secrets, then it's not actually MFA anymore.

I see this sentiment a lot and IMO it over-simplifies the security model pretty drastically. It's unlikely that a 1P vault is breached or leaked. For most people, the most likely threat vector for a random internet account is:

  1. they re-use a password across sites
  2. one site gets breached and that password is included in a hash dump (probably associated with their email)
  3. one the hashes are broken, an attacker can try that password on another site

In this situation, MFA stored in their password manager is still MFA because the TOTP secret wasn't leaked with the password (or it was and then it doesn't matter where you store it on your end).

The only case in which storing MFA secrets with your passwords becomes an issue is if other people have access to your laptop (and password manager). Then you'd probably want passwords on the laptop and MFA on your phone (or something else kept on your person).

Nobody questions leaving a yubikey in a laptop (which is also full of passwords). Even if doing so means anyone with your laptop can use your yubikey, it narrows your attack vector from "anyone who got your password" to "anyone with physical access to your laptop", which is a great reduction in scope (for most people).

mschuster91• 3 years ago

The only case in which storing MFA secrets with your passwords becomes an issue is if other people have access to your laptop (and password manager). Then you'd probably want passwords on the laptop and MFA on your phone (or something else kept on your person).

The problem is that a lot of the major package managers - at least nodejs npm/yarn, PHP composer, Apache Maven, Gradle - allow code execution of whatever packages were specified as part of the installation or build process.

That means there are an equal lot of very juicy targets for a takeover - just look at the most popular build plugins... and a few minutes are enough to deploy a keepass and browser credential store stealer to a ton of people. Getting local code execution isn't that difficult if you manage to spray your payload over a huge enough area.

Getting access to a target and their MFA device however is vastly more complicated.

Tainnor7• 3 years ago

That's not the only attack vector that is mitigated by TOTP. If a hacker is somehow able to intercept your password and your TOTP for a short period of time (e.g. because you're in an unsecured network at Starbucks or something), they can do exactly nothing with that knowledge afterwards. They won't be able to perform a replay attack, and they won't be able to guess your next TOTP, or any that comes after. The "only" thing they can do is attack you right at the moment where you're using the insecure network (e.g. with some sort of MITM attack).

insanitybit2• 3 years ago

Put another way: if you're storing the passwords in the same place as the MFA secrets, then it's not actually MFA anymore.

Sure, but PyPI was also giving away yubikeys. Also, you're assuming that the compromise involves fully owning a device instead of the much more common case of phishing/password reuse.

Tainnor7• 3 years ago

IMHO, there's a bit of confusion around terminology here. People aren't really mandating "MFA" unless they're requiring Yubikeys or something. But they are requiring TOTP, and adding TOTP to your login flow does mitigate certain kinds of attacks (though, of course not others).

So maybe we should just be more honest about what we call things. "True" MFA is too inconvenient for most people - even banking apps are not only happy to let you log in from exactly the same device that they will send verification codes to, they usually make more secure workflows more of a pain too. But we're still gaining some additional security by having one-time codes that can't as easily be stolen without having access to the device.

rightbyte• 3 years ago

Ye what happened to those designated code boxes the banks handed out?

Seems like a almost fool proof device. Airgaped too.

predictabl33• 3 years ago

I'm sorry, no, I'm not remotely sorry. It's not hard to carry a Yubikey. Period, done.

Caligatio• 3 years ago

It actually is hard to carry a Yubikey and, more importantly, use a Yubikey. Some employers don't allow personal USB-like devices in the building nor plugging them into company owned computers.

I say this as someone that has several that are used at home but needs to use personal TOTP codes at work.

jjgreen4• 3 years ago

Having two single factors is obviously more secure than one, and three, ten, fifty, all the better. That's why the name was changed from 2FA to MFA.

vladvasiliu• 3 years ago

While I can see the merit in discussing the issue of where to store the second factor, what I see much less often discussed is the story on the "tooling" side.

For example, on PyPI, to upload stuff, you need to generate a token. Now you have effectively a single factor, which requires as much care as a regular password.

di• 3 years ago

This is why PyPI recommends using Trusted Publishing (https://docs.pypi.org/trusted-publishers/) which removes the need for long-lived tokens entirely.

yodelshady• 3 years ago

For the vast majority of services, dump the passwords requirement then.

Physically stealing a token from me is a much riskier, less scalable attack than slinging hashes from someone's hobby site into GPUs.

tialaramex4• 3 years ago

Also outside of Hollywood movies there's not a great intersection between people who are great at this sort of hands on crime (e.g. robbery, pick pocketing) and the high level strategy needed to want a specific person's MFA token. Tom Cruise would play a character who does that (and rides a motorcycle, obviously) but in the real world it's not a thing.

Unlike car keys the tokens don't even know what they're for. You can walk around a car park with keys and match the car, these days it'll even remotely blip the lights - but if you have some random guy's Yubico Security Key, you don't even know if he uses Facebook, Google, PyPI, or what, let alone what the account's username/ email might be. Good luck.

insanitybit2• 3 years ago

Awesome stuff, I really hope others follow suit.

angry_octet• 3 years ago

Will there be a way to determine is a package has all owners 2FA enrolled? Maybe even a public key that is linked to the account? It would be good to have an API queryable mechanism linking identity with signing.

woodruffw5• 3 years ago

By the end of 2023, all users on PyPI will be required to enable some form of 2FA to perform packaging operations. So the distinction between has 2FA and not will become moot.

TheBrokenRail• 3 years ago

I hate these 2FA mandates. I don't use PyPI, but I do use GitHub, which has also announced a 2FA mandate.

I use my GitHub account to make bug reports, small pull requests, and silly personal projects. It is not that important. I want to sacrifice security for convenience on it, and that should be my choice.

I also do not agree with the argument this secures the supply chain because:

1. It ignores supply-chain attacks from people who already have repository access.

2. Most big companies (ie. Google) are probably already using 2FA.

3. And if people are automatically pulling code from random people/groups without checking it... maybe that's what actually needs to be banned.

d4mi3n• 3 years ago

I don’t really agree with your sentiment, but the points you make aren’t wrong. The big issue I see is with your last point:

3. And if people are automatically pulling code from random people/groups without checking it... maybe that's what actually needs to be banned.

Github does not have control over this but would largely be blamed for the fallout, regardless of how reckless some individuals may be.

The best most orgs can do to avoid liability/risk is usually to make changes to things they control, even if it isn’t the best option.

You see this sort of coping mechanism in all sorts of situations if you start looking for it.

fsociety• 3 years ago

Unfortunately even if you did not pull code from random groups, and instead curated your GitHub dependencies, you can still be caught by surprise when one person has a re-used password and no 2FA because “ugh it’s so inconvenient”.

Nothing will fully secure the supply chain, but this certainly reduces risk and given the impact software has in today’s world it’s important.

CatWChainsaw2• 3 years ago

I hate 2FA where it's not needed because it removes the last vestige of anonymous accounts.

dankle• 3 years ago

Good

bombolo3• 3 years ago

I'm personally annoyed by 2FA.

Most importantly, as a normal person, I'm more inclined to go through security hoops with internet banking and payments, and much less so for every single website that exists.

Grimburger• 3 years ago

Hard disagree here, supply chain attacks are big business, it matters a lot more than a few thousand bucks in a savings account which can be easily reversed if stolen by crooks. PyPi isn't "every single website", it's full of modules powering a lot of the internet and other critical infrastructure.

I have a hardware key for the 2FA on my meagre open source libraries, it takes 10 seconds to pull it out of my pocket and use it. Why is that a bad thing if it's enforced? It seems more like you have a UX problem here, there's solid open source TOTP software that come with browser extensions and are one click to use. SMS only can be a pain but many companies are moving away from that, albeit slowly.

j16sdiz• 3 years ago

(not OP)

I understand why they are needed. I still dislike them.

It’s like washing dishes. I understand why they need to be washed, how good a modern disk-washer can be ...and I still hate them.

bombolo3• 3 years ago

I also ave a hardware key, I got it for free last year.

It doesn't take 10 seconds. It takes remembering to keep it with me when I travel.

Also with 2FA the risk of being permanently locked out of my account increases A LOT.

With a bank or similar I can show up to their office, show my id and reset all access. With websites there is NOBODY responding. I've tried taking over an abandoned project on pypi for which I've done several contributions before the owner disappeared. Never got any response.

So losing the keys means that I have to fork my own project :D

CatWChainsaw2• 3 years ago

This is KYC on steroids.

pabs3• 3 years ago

Wonder if PyPI will ever get reproducible builds.

https://reproducible-builds.org/

PyPI Requires 2FA for New User Registrations

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