Trishank Karthik Kuppusamy, Vladimir Diaz and Justin Cappos
A popular community repository such as Docker Hub, PyPI, or RubyGems distributes tens of thousands of software projects to millions of users. The large number of projects and users make these repositories attractive targets for exploitation. After a repository compromise, a malicious party can launch a number of attacks on unsuspecting users, including rollback attacks that revert projects to obsolete and vulnerable versions. Unfortunately, due to the rapid rate at which packages are updated, existing techniques that protect against rollback attacks would cause each user to download 2–3 times the size of an average package in metadata each month, making them impractical to deploy.