the conda-forge blog

We do a lot of things but only blog about some of them.

Here are some recent selections.

• Security updates to our installers - conda-forge, 2023-07-13

  In June 2023, software engineers from Anaconda have reported a security issue in the uninstallers that are included in the Windows versions of the miniforge and mambaforge installers, one of the main ways to bootstrap conda-forge based conda and mamba distributions.

• CircleCI Security Incident - conda-forge, 2023-03-12

  In early January 2023, CircleCI informed us that they had a large security breach where a third party had gained access to all the environment secrets stored in the service. For conda-forge, these secrets are the API token used to upload built packages to our staging area on anaconda.org and the unique token we generate for each feedstock. The feedstock tokens are used as part of our artifact staging process to ensure that only the maintainers of a given feedstock can upload packages built by that feedstock. Later in January, we were informed by CircleCI that their security breach started on December 19, 2022, with the bulk of the secrets being exfiltrated in plain text from their servers a few days later. A malicious third-party with access to these secrets could potentially upload compromised versions of any package on conda-forge in a so-called “supply chain” attack.

• Outreachy 2022 Wrap-up Blog - Surbhi Sharma, 2022-08-26

  This blog is about my work during my Outreachy internship with conda-forge. Before that a little about me - I am Surbhi, an Outreachy intern with conda-forge for the May-August 2022 cohort and I worked on documenting the conda-forge ecosystem.

• GPU enabled TensorFlow builds on conda-forge - Wolf Vollprecht, 2021-11-03

  Recently we’ve been able to add GPU-enabled TensorFlow builds to conda-forge! This was quite a journey, with multiple contributors trying different ways to convince the Bazel-based build system of TensorFlow to build CUDA-enabled packages. But we managed, and the pull request got merged.

• Travis CI Security Incident - Matthew R. Becker, 2021-09-24

  On September 9, 2021 one of our core devs discovered that artifacts building on Travis CI were being uploaded to our conda channel from PRs running on forked repositories. A quick investigation revealed that Travis CI was passing encrypted secrets to PR builds on forks. Further examination of our logs and artifacts indicated that this had been happening since about September 3, 2021. This security bug was subsequently confirmed by Travis CI. See this CVE for more details on this incident. As far as we know, there were no actual exploits against conda-forge which used this vulnerability.