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Critical open-source projects form the basis of many large software systems. They provide trusted and extensible implementations of important functionality for cryptography, compatibility, and security. Verifying commit authorship authenticity in open-source projects is essential and challenging. Git users can freely configure author details such as names and email addresses. Platforms like GitHub use such information to generate profile links to user accounts. We demonstrate three attack scenarios malicious actors can use to manipulate projects and profiles on GitHub to appear trustworthy. We designed a mixed-research study to assess the effect on critical open-source software projects and evaluated countermeasures. First, we conducted a large-scale measurement among 50,328 critical open-source projects on GitHub and demonstrated that contribution workflows can be abused in 85.9% of the projects. We identified 573,043 email addresses that a malicious actor can claim to hijack historic contributions and improve the trustworthiness of their accounts. When looking at commit signing as a countermeasure, we found that the majority of users (95.4%) never signed a commit, and for the majority of projects (72.1%), no commit was ever signed. In contrast, only 2.0% of the users signed all their commits, and for 0.2% of the projects all commits were signed. Commit signing is not associated with projects’ programming languages, topics, or other security measures. Second, we analyzed online security advice to explore the awareness of contributor spoofing and identify recommended countermeasures. Most documents exhibit awareness of the simple spoofing technique via Git commits but no awareness of problems with GitHub’s handling of email addresses. 

While securing dependencies and build systems is necessary, recent attacks have shown that developers are a commonly successfully attacked link in the chain. Therefore, a comprehensive approach that considers the human factor is crucial for effective software supply chain security. 

Version control systems for source code, such as Git, are key tools in modern software development. Many developers use services like GitHub or GitLab for collaborative software development. Many software projects include code secrets such as API keys or passwords that need to be managed securely. Previous research and blog posts found that developers struggle with secure code secret management and accidentally leaked code secrets to public Git repositories. Leaking code secrets to the public can have disastrous consequences, such as abusing services and systems or making sensitive user data available to attackers. In a mixed-methods study, we surveyed 109 developers with version control system experience. Additionally, we conducted 14 in-depth semi-structured interviews with developers who experienced secret leakage in the past. 30.3% of our participants encountered code secret leaks in the past. Most of them face several challenges with secret leakage prevention and remediation. Based on our findings, we discuss challenges, such as estimating the risks of leaked secrets, and the needs of developers in remediating and preventing code secret leaks, such as low adoption requirements. We conclude with recommendations for developers and source code platform providers to reduce the risk of secret leakage.