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secured_pip

An open-source, free, powerful, light-weight guard for your pip to avoid supply-chain attacks.

By using this, you can avoid being screwed by the poisoned LiteLLM, etc. just because you type pip install

Although secured_pip is designed for low learning budget, we still recommend you to read our docs before you try this product in your production environment.

What?

Currently, supply chain attacks are one of the major security concerns all over the world. The secured_pip project is a future pip wrapper focused on supply-chain risk controls.

Wait, What?

You can use

spip install requests

Instead of

pip install requests

To install a package more safely in the scope of supply chain security.

You do not need to configure. You do not need to learn. Just pure install-to-master.

In other words, you can completely replace pip install with spip install to make your installation safer :)

If you want a near drop-in experience, you can set a shell alias from pip to spip.

Command Prompt (Windows):

pip install secured_pip
doskey pip=spip $*

Bash (Linux):

pip install secured_pip
echo "alias pip='spip'" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Zsh (macOS):

pip install secured_pip
echo "alias pip='spip'" >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc

The secured_pip project will actively check for all the supply chain risks and avoid you installing potentially malicious packages when typing spip install

For install, secured_pip uses pip's own resolver and then checks the selected install plan before pip builds or installs the resolved distributions. If the checks pass, the same pip install flow continues; secured_pip does not run a second pip install for the already-resolved packages.

Except for the install commands, the project behaves exactly the same as the original pip program. That is, you can always use spip instead of pip in any case :)

For more details, please see our docs: https://spip.lamentxu.top/docs

What problem do secured_pip solved?

Supply-chain poisoning has always been a persistent security problem. Existing solutions include mature but expensive-to-run tools like GuardDog, and lightweight tools like sfw that rely entirely on a paid Socket API. GuardDog is too heavy for everyday CI usage and is better suited to static analysis by security researchers. Running GuardDog against every artifact downloaded by pip install, including all dependencies, would slow installs down. sfw is lighter, but its dependence on a paid API creates another cost for everyday developers.

secured_pip solves this by hooking into pip's installer and merging security checks directly into the pip install download and installation flow. At the same time, the performance impact is almost invisible (~0.04%). secured_pip is completely free for everyone.

Today, many independent developers have suffered CI server compromises that leak secret keys and cause serious damage. With secured_pip installed, that risk is greatly reduced, while requiring no payment, no extra performance budget, and no learning or configuration. Install it once with pip install secured_pip, set an alias once, and keep using pip while gaining an important protection layer in the background.

Warning policies

TODO

Contributions welcome:

• Framework
  • Support uv pip
  • Support pipx
• CI
  • Write a benchmark CI in the github workflow to compare the performance of spip install and pip install
• Documentation
  • Use some modern documentation framework to refactor the /doc/docs directory.
• Checks
  • Add check of the diff between the last version of the package and the to-be-installed version, search for malicious changes
    • If new .pth file is added
    • If setup.py has been changed

We currently have three install warning policies:

• HIGH: pause installation and require --ignore-warning
• MEDIUM: prompt y/n before continuing
• LOW: warn and continue

The default sensitivity is low, which uses the policy above. You can make the gate stricter with --sensitivity medium or --sensitivity high:

• --sensitivity medium: MEDIUM and above pause installation; LOW prompts.
• --sensitivity high: LOW and above pause installation.

When secured_pip detects a potential risk, a warning will be raised, with the level depending on the severity the risk is.

For now, the project has several major check points:

• Fake typo checks: Hackers often use "fake typos" to inject a malicious dependency package into the poisoned source file. secured_pip detects this by first resolving all the packages that pip install is going to download, and then comparing non-popular resolved package names with a local hot-package list. Warning levels:
  • Medium severity: requsets vs requests
  • Medium severity: pandaz vs pandas
  • Low severity: sixth vs six
• Direct URL dependency checks: If the install target or a resolved dependency uses a direct URL, VCS URL, or PEP 508 direct reference, secured_pip will raise a MEDIUM warning.
• Fresh release checks: If the selected PyPI release was published less than 2 days ago, secured_pip will raise a MEDIUM warning.
• Empty description checks: If the selected PyPI release metadata has no summary and no long description, secured_pip will raise a LOW warning.
• Suspicious metadata URL checks: If PyPI metadata points to a shortener, raw IP, suspicious TLD, embedded credentials, or similar suspicious URL, secured_pip will raise a LOW warning.
• Repository mismatch checks: If PyPI metadata points to a GitHub/GitLab repository whose repo name appears unrelated to the package name, secured_pip will raise a LOW warning.
• Maintainer email domain drift checks: If a package's maintainer email domain changes compared with the local secured_pip history cache, secured_pip will raise a LOW warning.
• Zero-version checks: If the selected package version is 0.0 or 0.0.0, secured_pip will raise a LOW warning.
• .pth file detection: Instead of directly injecting malicious code inside the package, today most hackers will place their bad stuff under a .pth file, with an import as the beginning. secured_pip only checks the installed file-system diff after installation. The warning level is always MEDIUM, and secured_pip will ask whether to delete the suspicious installed .pth file.
• TODO ...