Endless data attacks for pip with TUF

In an endless data attack, we serve endless data to pip. This will allow an attacker to fill up the victim's hard drive.

First, we set up the virtual environment (for cleanroom testing) and install pip-with-TUF:

$ cd /tmp
$ curl -O https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/v/virtualenv/virtualenv-1.10.1.tar.gz
$ tar xvfz virtualenv-1.10.1.tar.gz
$ python virtualenv-1.10.1/virtualenv.py --no-site-packages endless-data-with-tuf
$ source endless-data-with-tuf/bin/activate
$ sudo apt-get install python-dev libgmp-dev
$ pip install --upgrade https://github.com/theupdateframework/tuf/archive/v0.7.5.zip
$ pip install --upgrade https://github.com/theupdateframework/pip/archive/trishank.poly.edu.zip

Suppose that FooBar 0.1 is actually ~8MB and the web server sends instead FooBar-0.1 twice in a row:

# POINT TO REPOSITORY WITH INTACT TUF METADATA.
$ curl http://mirror1.poly.edu/test-pip/endless-data/tuf.interposition.json -o endless-data-with-tuf/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/tuf.interposition.json

$ pip install FooBar
Downloading/unpacking FooBar
  Downloading FooBar-0.1.tar.gz (unknown size): 8.4MB downloaded
  Running setup.py egg_info for package FooBar
    
Installing collected packages: FooBar
  Running setup.py install for FooBar
    FooBar 0.1
    
Successfully installed FooBar
Cleaning up...

In this small-scale test, pip-with-TUF simply downloaded the intended length of the file (read from the trusted, signed targets metadata) without trusting what the malicious web server served. A successful endless data attack would have filled up the victim's hard drive and prevented pip-with-TUF from checking for a bad hash. Compare this with the situation where pip works without TUF.