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> You had to go through a list of approved modules and versions.

I was actually talking about this with coworkers at lunch.

I think this is too expensive for individual developers/small companies, but there's really nothing stopping a wider open source community from marking specific modules+versions as more likely to be secure.

I think there should be some opt-in system for objectively predicting code quality and developer/maintainer opsec. Apply some rubric for {secure programing techniques, static+dynamic analysis, CI deploy toolchain, basic security hygiene of the developers} and recursively apply it to the upstream dependencies. Display the score according to that rubric on the project page -- this would be far more useful of a metric than "number of downloads" or "I used it at my last company".

It doesn't protect against malicious insiders, but not having a high score could act like the "Scarlett Letter" we need for low quality repo-modules.




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