[2607.21888] No Snake Oil: Verifying Python Package Builds

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arXiv:2607.21888 (cs)

[Submitted on 24 Jul 2026]

Title:No Snake Oil: Verifying Python Package Builds

Authors:Jens Dietrich, Spencer Sun, Tim W. White, Behnaz Hassanshahi<br>View a PDF of the paper titled No Snake Oil: Verifying Python Package Builds, by Jens Dietrich and 3 other authors

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Abstract:Python has become the default language for interacting with AI, with packages being distributed through registries like the Python Package Index (PyPI). This creates a need to analyse supply chains comprising such packages. One such analysis is to rebuild packages in order to identify compromised builds injecting malware. Independent rebuilds in hardened environments have the added advantage that they can generate and record provenance in order to increase the trustworthiness of packages. Two tools that are designed to automate such rebuilds and run them at scale are macaron and oss-rebuild. We study 12,180 popular releases from PyPI and find that the byte-for-byte equivalence rate is generally low. We analyse the reasons why they produce different wheels, and find that equivalence between the original and rebuilt wheels can often still be established, preserving most of the guarantees users expect from rebuildable releases. We present and evaluate daleq4py, a tool to establish the equivalence of Python wheels through the kernel of a normalisation function that is based on provenance-preserving datalog rules. Experimental results show that daleq4py substantially expands the set of rebuilds that can be accepted as equivalent. Although only 15.4% of macaron rebuilds and 19.1% of oss-rebuild rebuilds are byte-for-byte identical to the published PyPI wheels, daleq4py establishes wheel equivalence for 60.2% and 78.9% of source-equivalent rebuilds, respectively.

Comments:<br>11 pages, 2 figures

Subjects:

Software Engineering (cs.SE); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)

ACM classes:<br>D.4.6; D.2.9; D.2.7

Cite as:<br>arXiv:2607.21888 [cs.SE]

(or<br>arXiv:2607.21888v1 [cs.SE] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.21888

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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history<br>From: Jens Dietrich [view email]<br>[v1]<br>Fri, 24 Jul 2026 01:31:24 UTC (68 KB)

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