RAraggi·Aug 2, 2017
So you use https://github.com/whispersystems/gradle-witness, and you manually verify everything you whitelist right? And you never typo, right?
In Malicious crossenv package on npmsignalapp
gradle-witness
Groovy2014–2017
signalapp / gradle-witness · Archived
gradle-witness
A gradle plugin that enables static verification for remote dependencies.
3Distinct people
3Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
231GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A gradle plugin that enables static verification for remote dependencies.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year3 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2014-07-28 22:58:33 UTC to 2017-08-02 14:53:51 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
3 sources> I really like how the NPM simultaneously insults two legends in crypto and does _nothing_ to protect the node ecosystem, deferring to "better solutions" that don't exist and will never exist.
But they're right. What exactly would PKI do here? Someone is generating confusion.
You could argue that maybe a PKI solution could be used to inform the UI such that users are less likely to make mistakes, but browbeating NPM over this is silly. Maven has this problem (people really concerned built their own tools: https://github.com/whispersystems/gradle-witness), choclatey has this problem, pip has this problem, everyone has this problem.
The big difference is that the NPM ecosystem is just an order of magnitude bigger than most others, and its model of many small packages can hide many more key packages in the noise.
In Malicious crossenv package on npmAt Open Whisper Systems, we wrote a small open source gradle plugin called "gradle-witness" for this reason. Not just because dependencies could be transported over an insecure channel, but also because dependencies could be compromised if the gradle/maven repository were compromised:
https://github.com/whispersystems/gradle-witness
It allows you to "pin" dependencies by specifying the sha256sum of the jar you're expecting.
In How to take over the computer of a Maven Central user