PyPI's new security indicators and unequal access to Trusted Publishing

[woodruffw (William Woodruff)]

@pf_moore

I’d assume that getting such a change would need explicit action on the part of the project, to ensure an attacker couldn’t also remove the flag, but I’d hope it’s possible so that projects don’t get marked negatively forever after a legitimate change.

I just checked, and I believe the way the current implementation works is that it clears the “lost provenance” flag once 14 days after the last attested release has passed. (Source)

I didn’t work on this so I can’t infer the intent with that, but it seems likely that the idea was to balance interests: after 14 days without the package being deleted or otherwise quarantined, it’s likely that the change in attestation status was intentional. And subsequent releases will also not be marked as having changed, they’ll go back to the “neutral” state.