CI Supply Chain Attacks Expose Gap That cilock Tool Aims to Fix

Recent supply chain attacks on aquasecurity/trivy-action and two litellm PyPI releases demonstrated how malicious code can execute inside CI pipelines without leaving a verifiable trace. In the trivy-action incident, 75 version tags were force-pushed, causing pinned pipelines to pull credential-stealing code that read environment variables and exfiltrated secrets to a rogue domain. The litellm attack embedded a stealer in a .pth file, which Python executes automatically at startup regardless of whether the package is explicitly imported. Both incidents highlighted a core problem: CI workflows log what is configured, not what actually runs. An open-source tool called cilock addresses this by using ptrace or eBPF to trace build-time execution and sign the results as a cryptographic attestation, allowing teams to verify what code truly ran rather than relying on trust.