hard to imagine how package signing works without key management, and key management doesn’t work at scale, so i’m not sure this is a super fair criticism
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I think TUF works well for managing a developer PKI and applying package AuthZ policies, however it’s also worth noting that would’ve done nothing to prevent this particular attack, since it was malware injected via transitive dependencies by an authorized publisher
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There are language package managers with package signing. At the very least, pinning the key fingerprint on first use with a mechanism for automatically rotating to requiring signatures from additional new keys works well.
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I'm not sure that end-user key management actually does work well for a system that operates at the scale that NPM does. Do you know what the largest deployment of such a package manager is?
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I don't understand what scale has to do with it. Package signing works fine for many other package managers with a large scale. The basic trust on first use security properties don't require any end user key management or extra work on their part.
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I too have direct experience working on many package managers specifically on the problem of package signing, and I would argue for a signing system to be useful, at a minimum every package needs to be signed by a key which is ultimately trusted by the end user
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...but then there’s this problem to consider: how to handle key rotation
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For package signing, automatic rotation based on the old key signing a off on the rotation to a new key works well. Here's an example:
source.android.com/security/apksi
I don't understand making this out to be so hard when package signing is used at huge scales surprisingly successfully.
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I don't think we can know that. The original developer may have taken it more seriously if they were required to transfer a signing key to the new developer. I get the impression that they didn't put much thought into it having security implications for the downstream users.