PSF Security Engineer Update (PyCon US 2026)

Transcript

1. PYTHON SOFTWARE FOUNDATION SECURITY UPDATE
2. 1 2 3 attacks From typosquats to packages everybody installs secrets Credentials have become prime targets audits Transparency is essential for trust PyPI Perspective
3. Attacks are moving upstream • >900 new projects on PyPI every day • 2800+ malware reports since last PyCon US • num2words >300k/day of transitive blast radius • litellm, telnyx, lightning, xinference, etc ◦ LiteLLM: 119,000 compromised downloads before quarantine ◦ ~40–50% of installs were unpinned TL,DR: AUDIT & PIN YOUR DEPS
5. Secrets are the target • pypj.org phishing campaign (July 2025) • s1ngularity (August 2025) • GhostAction (September 2025) • Shai-Hulud 1.0 (September 2025) • s1ngularity second wave (September 2025) • Shai-Hulud 2.0 (November 2025) • Mini Shai-Hulud (April-May 2026)
6. Can’t steal what you don’t havehttps://docs.pypi.org/trusted-publishers/ ✓ PyPI ✓ crates.io ✓ RubyGems ✓ npmjs.com ✓ NuGet ✓ Packagist ✓ GitHub Actions ✓ Google Cloud ✓ ActiveState ✓ GitLab CI/CD ? CircleCI (in review) ? GLSM/GHES (beta) TL,DR: REPLACE ONE TOKEN ASAP
7. PyPI Audit #2 Sovereign Tech Agency, Trail of Bits
8. Trust, but verify - and publish the receipts • 14 findings: 2 High · 1 Medium · 7 Low · 4 Informational • 12 remediated, 2 accepted with rationale • High: org members could invite Owners • High: project transfers silently retained permissions • Bonus: custom CodeQL queries from the auditors, in CI https://blog.pypi.org/posts/2026-04-16-pypi-completes-second-audit/ TL,DR: DON’T TAKE MY WORD FOR IT
9. Software Vulnerabilities
10. ~65 CVEs in 2026
11. 7 new vulnerabilities in CPython, pip, uv Share knowledge and coordinate!
12. Python Security Response Team (PEP 811)
13. Software Bill of Materials (PEP 770) Red Hat, Fedora, auditwheel, pip, Maturin, pandas, cryptography, Meson, Pillow …(hundreds more)
14. Fuzzing Python Standard Library EU Cyber Resilience Act Malware & Incident Response GitLab Self-Hosted Trusted Publishers pylock.toml, Dependency Cooldowns NEW PyCon US Security Talk Track
15. Alpha-Omega Anthropic Google Sovereign Tech Agency “Security isn’t free!”
16. PyPI Blog PSF Blog “Get Python security news!”