[fabioz]

The way I'd go about this is probably starting a VM, installing the package and seeing what in the filesystem is affected by it rather than trying to do static analysis (which becomes a cat and mouse game as detection heuristics improve so do the stealth heuristics).

The attack surface area is too big when random python code is executed, which is the case for `setup.py`, but even if there wasn't code executed there, as soon as you import the package and use it, you'd have the same issue.

[bigDinosaur]

Unless you can hide the fact that it's running in a VM, I don't see why code couldn't act normally if it thought it was being analysed like this. Or what about some kind of payload that executes after a long delay, and would become visible for long running programs but not short tests? and so on.