Recent content on Brandon Mitchell
A simple typo of ghcr.io to ghrc.io would normally be a small goof. You’d typically get a 404 or similar error, finally work out the issue, fix it, and move along. But in this case, that typo appears to be doing something very malicious, stealing GitHub credentials. What’s ghcr.io? First, a quick bit of background. ghcr.io is an OCI conformant registry for container images and OCI…
Go made a promise to developers. Code that was written today would always compile with newer versions of Go. And so far, they’ve kept that promise. But for developers of software that is maintained, they’ve also broken that promise. The language can now change, and Go changes its behavior based on the version defined in the go.mod file of a project. So if you don’t want to update…
Open Source Software (OSS) has an onboarding and a retention problem. These problems are connected, but it’s not clear which is the cause versus the effect. Much of this is based on a conflict of goals and personalities between the different types of OSS contributors. Student The student is looking to leverage their OSS contributions as part of their eduction and to enhance their resume.…
The financial industry has a concept of “know your customer” to prevent financial fraud. The concept is that fraudsters do not want transactions linked back to their identity. There’s a similar push happening in Open Source security, to verify the identities of contributors before allowing their commits. The suggestion is that this could prevent an xz style attack by requiring in…
Reproducible builds are an idealistic solution to many supply chain security challenges I see today. They eliminate an entire chain of attacks, from a compromised build infrastructure (see SolarWinds) to a compromised artifact distribution. But they are only a piece of the solution, and they are rarely implemented today. Here’s my take on what a complete solution would look like, and why no…
It seems like every blog needs to start with an introduction, so here’s mine. I’m Brandon Mitchell, a currently semi-retired OSS developer. My career started in consulting and contracting in the Enterprise Management space (think sysadmin but for large distributed networks using expensive software). The second phase of the career shifted into the Docker container, cloud native, and…
Background Principle Solutions Architect, experienced in software supply chain security, migrating applications into Docker containers using CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes, and a variety of CNCF tools. Member of the Docker Captains Program, OCI Maintainer, and member of various CNCF and OpenSSF groups. Prior experience in enterprise systems management, configuration management, monitoring solutions,…