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Harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from websites

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Re: Harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from websites

#81
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say the following: Except that being responsible for your dependencies (and the dependencies of your dependencies...) is impossibly hard. You would need to build everything yourself after auditing the code. But then I thought about it some more and its likely that you don’t need to audit the code, since the malware probably isn’t in the public git repo. Yes, its still a risk, but the probability of mal…

It's only impossibly hard to audit this kind of thing if you have an insanely large and deep tree of transitive dependencies in the first place. This seems to be a particularly bad problem in the JS world, for this and many other reasons, but most programming languages and their communities don't work that way. Auditing a small number of larger dependencies, when most of them are probably widely used and from reasona…

I also think that with tree shaking and last-mile minification being more common these days, auditing might not be as daunting as it seems.

Re: Harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from websites

#82

I recently had a problem with a package that doesn't have its npm releases tagged in git. It surprised me how hard it was to figure out which git revisions corresponded to specific npm releases. I had tracked down the npm version of the package that introduced the bug I was trying to fix, but without getting in and doing some real diffing, I couldn't figure out which commit introduced the bug. At the time, I'd never…

Yep, only authors who are good about using `npm version` and pushing the resulting git tag to origin are going to have the proper linkage.

Re: Harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from websites

#83
post #54
post #35

There is this trade-off between usability and security. For example being able to load data from other domains, now with origin policy we have do fetch the data server side. One nice thing about web apps is that they do not require a server to work. But due to xxs injections we cant have nice things.

It's almost like the browser is being abused to do something it fundamentally should not be doing. If you need to do that much client side heavy lifting maybe a web browser is not the place for it? The ship has probably sailed on that line of thinking but in my opinion a lot of the pain we experience in web security today comes from people trying to do things they really should not be doing.

Good point. I’ll talk to some guys and we’ll turn off the World Wide Web tomorrow. Fun experiment but there were a few security bugs (fixable, but why spend the time?) and, most importantly, @mulmen didn’t like it too much.

Re: Harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from websites

#85
post #47
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes npm particularly bad, is that JS has such a teribad stdlib. When you need to write your own lpad() at some point its easier to include a stupid little package that has dealt with all the edge cases you don't want to care about. So you end up with way more third party deps than a kitchen sink type language. Otherwise, yes this is a fundamental dependency issue.

but that has nothing to do with npm. that's the same for any javascript package manager - yarn or bower would be the same.

npmjs.com is the repository both yarn and npm use—this is about npmjs.com the repository, not npm the package manager per se.

Re: Harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from websites

#86
post #42
post #39

I'm more of a back-end dev who doesn't know all the ins and outs of the actual software used - can someone explain to me why this is an npm problem, and not an excessive dependencies problem? I thought npm was simply a package manager - I don't see anything in the article that is specific to npm, except he happens to say that word.

What makes npm particularly bad, is that JS has such a teribad stdlib. When you need to write your own lpad() at some point its easier to include a stupid little package that has dealt with all the edge cases you don't want to care about. So you end up with way more third party deps than a kitchen sink type language. Otherwise, yes this is a fundamental dependency issue.

You can actually pad your strings now https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Re: Harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from websites

#87
post #76
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like the browser is being abused to do something it fundamentally should not be doing. If you need to do that much client side heavy lifting maybe a web browser is not the place for it? The ship has probably sailed on that line of thinking but in my opinion a lot of the pain we experience in web security today comes from people trying to do things they really should not be doing.

There's this vision for the web that we should be able to access public "data" , not only web sites "guarding" it.

Maybe you and I have different definitions of Internet and web then. You can still access data without javascript or webapps.

Re: Harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from websites

#88
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like the browser is being abused to do something it fundamentally should not be doing. If you need to do that much client side heavy lifting maybe a web browser is not the place for it? The ship has probably sailed on that line of thinking but in my opinion a lot of the pain we experience in web security today comes from people trying to do things they really should not be doing.

Good point. I’ll talk to some guys and we’ll turn off the World Wide Web tomorrow. Fun experiment but there were a few security bugs (fixable, but why spend the time?) and, most importantly, @mulmen didn’t like it too much.

That's really not my suggestion.

If you need to write a full application why does it have to happen in a browser? Why can't we use the model so successfully employed on mobile devices?

Re: Harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from websites

#89
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. I’ll talk to some guys and we’ll turn off the World Wide Web tomorrow. Fun experiment but there were a few security bugs (fixable, but why spend the time?) and, most importantly, @mulmen didn’t like it too much.

That's really not my suggestion. If you need to write a full application why does it have to happen in a browser? Why can't we use the model so successfully employed on mobile devices?

A security hole in a web app is only confined to that app/domain. Where a security hole in a native app can be much more detrimental. It's also less work to make a web app if you want it to work on more then one platform. Making a web app is also a better dev experience, at least for GUI apps.

Re: Harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from websites

#90
post #87
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's this vision for the web that we should be able to access public "data" , not only web sites "guarding" it.

Maybe you and I have different definitions of Internet and web then. You can still access data without javascript or webapps.

Accessing data either require's identification to a database or you access the data over the web/http. Do you have any examples where you can access public data without logging in ? I can only think of FTP servers that lets you access anonymously ...
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