While "open source" fundamentally doesn't work that way, the point here is about maintainers, not regular contributors. Identity of new maintainers must be vetted (via in-person meetups and whatever other mechanisms) by other "trusted" maintainers whose identities are "verified".
I realize, it's a hard problem. (And, thanks for the link to the "Know, Prevent, Fix" post.)
PS: FWIW, I "win my bread" by working for a company that "does" open source.
Edit: Some projects I know use in-person GPG key signing, or maintainer summits (Linux kernel), etc. None of them are perfect, but raises the bar for motivated anonymous contributors with malicious intent, wanting to become maintainers.
I’ve worked with a few very talented pseudonymous developers on the Internet over the years. I can’t think of any way to vet their identities while maintaining their anonymity (well, it’s basically impossible by definition), plus if you’re talking about in-person meetups, traveling from, say, Asia to North America isn’t cheap and there could be visa issues. The distinction between maintainers and non-maintainers isn’t that meaningful because non-maintainers with frequent and high quality contributions will gain a degree of trust anyway. The attack we’re discussing isn’t about someone ramming obviously malicious code through as a maintainer, they passed or could have passed code review.
You make excellent points; I agree. Especially, a non-maintainer with a high-quality contribution gaining trust. Many times, (tired) maintainers are forced to "rubber-stamp" and merge such high-quality patches. It could be due to any number of (valid) reasons—a CVE fix, an involved performance fix that will take you weeks to load up on the context, enabling a hardware feature that's under semi-NDA, you just trust their work too well, maintainer fatigue, etc.
What I'm saying is, in context of critical-path software, the identity of maintainers vs non-maintainers matters more. I'm not naively claiming that it'll "solve" the problem at hand, just that it's another layer in defense. For a critical software, you shouldn't be able to simply submit a "patch"[1] such as:
Commit it yourself, brazenly push it into Linux distros, and then anonymously sign off into the sunset with no trace. I'm sure you'll agree that there's a world of difference between a deeply entrenched, critical libray and a random user-space application.
It's a messy situation. How much, if at all, "clever tech" can mitigate this human "trust issue" is an open problem for now.
> traveling from, say, Asia to North America isn’t cheap and there could be visa issues.
And there are other reasons some people might not want to travel outside their nearby region. For instance, they might be taking care of an elderly relative. Or they might be the elderly relative, with travel counter-indicated for health reasons.
I realize, it's a hard problem. (And, thanks for the link to the "Know, Prevent, Fix" post.)
PS: FWIW, I "win my bread" by working for a company that "does" open source.
Edit: Some projects I know use in-person GPG key signing, or maintainer summits (Linux kernel), etc. None of them are perfect, but raises the bar for motivated anonymous contributors with malicious intent, wanting to become maintainers.