Hacker News Reader

Comment by lrvick | Hacker News Reader

I can prove all contributions to stagex are by humans because we all belong to a 25 year old web of trust with 5444 endorser keys including most redhat, debian, ubuntu, and fedora maintainers, with all of our own maintainer keys in smartcards we tap to sign every review and commit, and we do background checks on every new maintainer.

I am completely serious. We have always had a working proof of human system called Web of Trust and while everyone loves to hate on PGP (in spite of it using modern ECC crypto these days) it is the only widely deployed spec that solves this problem.

https://kron.fi/en/posts/stagex-web-of-trust/

View on HN

You can prove the commits were signed by a key you once verified. It is your trust in those people which allows you to extend that to “no LLM” usage, but that’s reframing the conversation as one of trust, not human / machine. Which is (charitably) GPs point: stop framing this as machine vs human — assume (“accept”) that all text can be produced by machines and go from there: what now? That’s where your proposal is one solution: strict web of trust. It has pros and cons (barrier to entry for legitimate first timers), but it’s a valid proposal.

All that to say “you’re not disagreeing with the person you’re replying to” lol xD

I can prove that code was signed by a key that was verified to belong to a single human body by lots of in-person high reputation humans.

How the code was authored, who cares, but I can prove it had multiple explicit cryptographic human signoffs before merge, and that is what matters in terms of quality control and supply chain attack resistance.

Exactly. So in the words of the comment you replied to: why are we wasting energy on worrying about Claude code impersonating humans? We have that solution you proposed.

That’s what I mean by “you agree with the person to whom you replied”

I suppose you are correct. I am agreeing that if one widely deployed the defense tactics projects like stagex use, then asshats using things like undercover will not be trusted.

Unfortunately outside of classic Linux packaging platforms, useful web of trust and signing is very rare, so I expect things like undercover mode being popular are going to make everything a lot worse before it gets better.

Your last point, I think, is why so many sibling commenters are balking at GP :)

Can't you just instruct Claude Code to use your signing keys? I understand you may say "I won't." But my point is that someone can.

The people who signed my keys trust me to be an honest human actor that chose this as the singular identity they signed for the human body they met in person.

I -could- burn my 16+ years of reputation by letting a bot start signing commits as me, and I could also set my house on fire. I have very strong incentive not to do so as my aggregate trust is very expensive and the humans that signed me would be unlikely to sign a second if I ruined the reputation of my first.

This incentive structure is why web of trust actually works pretty well, and is the best "proof of human" we are likely ever going to have while respecting privacy and anonymity for those that need it.

You can only prove that all contributions are pushed by those humans, and you can quite explicitly/clearly not prove that those humans didn't use any AI prior to pushing.

I absolutely do not care what autocomplete tools someone used. Only that they as humans own and sign what is submitted so it is attached to their very expensive reputations they do not want to lose.

That’s great, and I also don’t care. But I think all people are saying is that by most definitions you cannot “prove all contributions to stagex are by humans”.

Or are you saying you can prove that aliens and cats didn’t make them? Because I’m not sure that’s true either.

And once you find out someone has trained their dog to commit something, how exactly do you revoke your trust?

I think if you answer these questions you’ll see pretty quickly why this solution isn’t the silver bullet you think it is.

Edit: stagex looks really, really good

It is not a silver bullet by itself, but when combined with the other tactics in stagex I believe it gives us a very strong supply chain attack defense.

I can not prove the tools used, but I can prove multiple humans signed off on code with keys they stake their personal reputations on that I have confirmed they maintain on smartcards.

While nothing involving humans is perfect I feel it is best effort with existing tools and standards and makes us one of the hardest projects to deploy a successful supply chain attack on today.

Edit: Saw your edit. Thanks!

With 5400+ people I am betting that you have at least one person in your 'web of trust' that no longer deserves that trust.

That's one of the intrinsic problems with webs of trust (and with democracy...), you extend your trust but it does not automatically revoke when the person can no longer be trusted.

Of course! There are always edge cases, but I would suspect the number of bots signed by reputable keys to be near 0%, and the honest human score in this trust graph to be well over 90%.

Compare to how much we should trust any random unsigned key signing commits, or unsigned commits, in which the trust should be 0% unless you have reviewed the code yourself.

The problem is all it really takes is one edge case to successfully break a web of trust to the point that the web of trust becomes a blind spot. Instead of distrusting everybody (which should be the default) the web of trust attempts to create a 'walled garden of trust' and behind that wall everybody can be friendly. That gives a successful attacker a massive advantage.

If we were talking about any linux distribution before stagex, I would agree with you.

Stagex however expects at least one maintainer may at any time engage in reputation-ending dishonesty or simply they were threatened or coerced. This is why every single release is signed by a -quorum- of code reviewers and code reproducers that must all build locally and get identical hashes, so no single points of failure exist in our trust graph.

Our last release was signed by four geodistributed maintainers that all attest to having built the entire distribution from 180 bytes of machine code all the way up with the same hashes.

All of their keys being compromised at once gets beyond the pale.

While I appreciate all of the effort you put in this and respect that you trust this to be bulletproof I'm always going to be skeptical of silver bullets.

Your level of certainty is the thing that frightens me more than the confidence I have in the quality of your work.

I am reasonably confident it is the current industry best effort, and way beyond the status quo, not that it is perfect.

We combine many tactics for defense in depth that I strongly suspect if widely deployed would put a stop to the daily supply chain attack headlines.

nothing about this proves anything except that someone or something had access to the key.

Do you think it is likely that the majority of the people that spent decades building this trust graph and gaining the trust needed to be release engineers on the packages that power the whole internet are just going to hand off control of that key to a bot?

Anyone doing so would be setting their professional reputations completely on fire, and burning your in-person-built web of trust is a once in a lifetime thing.

Basically, we trust the keys belong to humans and are controlled by humans because to do otherwise would be a violation of the universally understood trust contract and would thus be reputational bankruptcy that would take years to overcome, if ever.

Even so, we assume at least one maintainer is dishonest at all times, which is why every action needs signatures from two or more maintainers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com