I don’t use syncthing (anymore) and didn’t know the story behind this, but one thing I know is, f-droid builds the apk from source and signs it with their keys, or if reproducible builds are available, it verifies the signed apk provided by the maintainer to match bit-for-bit with the source code, so at least even if one doesn’t trust the new maintainer, they should be able to trust f-droid that the apk matches the source, so e.g. no spyware or malware was added for example. Sure, someone still needs to review the source, of course.
Thats part of the problem though. Supposedly catfriend1 gave researchxxl their signing keys, and researchxxl used these on their new github account. No one was aware that catfriend1 was not maintaining the repo anymore until users saw unexpected/unannounced updates and looked into the matter. This sparked a short lived discussion on F-Droid forums about what should be done when maintainer transfers are handled poorly like this. F-Droid admins decided that it wasn’t that big of an issue, which is problematic… this supposedly happened between two people meeting each other online and discussing it with each other. But its possible that catfriend1 is being blackmailed or otherwise coerced into handing off this data. This type of credential attack could happen with a compromised machine, without the victim ever realizing it in time. The fact that F-Droid treats this so casually is upsetting. Signed developer certificates protect you from MITM attacks, it does not protect you from the sources themselves being compromised.
I don’t use syncthing (anymore) and didn’t know the story behind this, but one thing I know is, f-droid builds the apk from source and signs it with their keys, or if reproducible builds are available, it verifies the signed apk provided by the maintainer to match bit-for-bit with the source code, so at least even if one doesn’t trust the new maintainer, they should be able to trust f-droid that the apk matches the source, so e.g. no spyware or malware was added for example. Sure, someone still needs to review the source, of course.
Thats part of the problem though. Supposedly catfriend1 gave researchxxl their signing keys, and researchxxl used these on their new github account. No one was aware that catfriend1 was not maintaining the repo anymore until users saw unexpected/unannounced updates and looked into the matter. This sparked a short lived discussion on F-Droid forums about what should be done when maintainer transfers are handled poorly like this. F-Droid admins decided that it wasn’t that big of an issue, which is problematic… this supposedly happened between two people meeting each other online and discussing it with each other. But its possible that catfriend1 is being blackmailed or otherwise coerced into handing off this data. This type of credential attack could happen with a compromised machine, without the victim ever realizing it in time. The fact that F-Droid treats this so casually is upsetting. Signed developer certificates protect you from MITM attacks, it does not protect you from the sources themselves being compromised.