Remember that AWS credentials are easy to lock down. At the very least you could add an ACL to only let them be used on your AWS instances. Then you can set up alerts if someone attempts to use them outside.
PyPI: Python packets steal AWS keys from users
11–20 of 104 posts
Re: PyPI: Python packets steal AWS keys from users
#12Glad they were able to automatically detect/catch this. There seems to be so much bloat when dependencies get pulled in. Wonder if something like pledge and unveil around library code could be helpful; perhaps library code needs to be separated out into a separate process that would not have reason to access AWS keys. Also, looking at the screenshot, could a simple programming searching for URLs in the library code h…
Is it really automated? The infographic glosses over the how with a “security research team” in the flowchart. Maybe the automation catches suspicious code/activity (like the urls or accessing sensitive files) and the research team just verifies
Re: PyPI: Python packets steal AWS keys from users
#13I believe this is something that automated code parsing (a la Github Copilot) could really shine. Those tools are able to explain what a block of code does, so it should be possible to catch many types of malware hidden in source code.
This is the kind of stuff that antiviruses did for ages, from signature, code simulation to heuristics. They have a lot of expertise in this, it feels like they could branch out in finding malware in source code, instead of in binaries.
Source code has issues with obfuscation methodologies that can defeat a lot of techniques. It’s why companies are trying to build more analysis down into the kernel such as via EBPF. For example, concatenating a series of strings and characters that wind up reading from .AWS/credentials in the end is surprisingly tough to catch based upon simple pattern recognition alone, especially if it’s done in a subtle way such as with a spare buffer while doing other legit activities. So until the syscall gets issued and all substitutions resolved the user space analysis can be highly resource intensive or inaccurate
Re: PyPI: Python packets steal AWS keys from users
#14Title should be "packages" rather than "packets".
Re: PyPI: Python packets steal AWS keys from users
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a human can't figure it out than an AI trained on human behavior (or more specifically, trained on comments left next to code) can't figure it out either. It's not like malware authors annotate their code with nice "here's where I exfiltrate all the user's secret data" comments.
That's not going to stop people from trying though. If people keep abusing the package managers like this, then publishing open source code is at risk of ending up like distributing binaries on Windows, where you need to fight dozens of virus scanners arbitrarily blocking your code for no apparent reason. Imagine opening a tab in VSCode only to see a popup warning saying it might be harmful, even though you just wrot…
This kinda happens already.
I get prompted to trust stuff I wrote
Re: PyPI: Python packets steal AWS keys from users
#16Remember that AWS credentials are easy to lock down. At the very least you could add an ACL to only let them be used on your AWS instances. Then you can set up alerts if someone attempts to use them outside.
But wouldn’t any host running the malicious package be vulnerable to having creds stolen from that host? Maybe I don’t know which “ACL” tech you’re referencing. You can limit where credentials are used from, and not just something like where an S3 bucket is read from? (For example)
Re: PyPI: Python packets steal AWS keys from users
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a human can't figure it out than an AI trained on human behavior (or more specifically, trained on comments left next to code) can't figure it out either. It's not like malware authors annotate their code with nice "here's where I exfiltrate all the user's secret data" comments.
That's not going to stop people from trying though. If people keep abusing the package managers like this, then publishing open source code is at risk of ending up like distributing binaries on Windows, where you need to fight dozens of virus scanners arbitrarily blocking your code for no apparent reason. Imagine opening a tab in VSCode only to see a popup warning saying it might be harmful, even though you just wrot…
That's exactly was vscode does for me.
Re: PyPI: Python packets steal AWS keys from users
#18I believe this is something that automated code parsing (a la Github Copilot) could really shine. Those tools are able to explain what a block of code does, so it should be possible to catch many types of malware hidden in source code.
If a human can't figure it out than an AI trained on human behavior (or more specifically, trained on comments left next to code) can't figure it out either. It's not like malware authors annotate their code with nice "here's where I exfiltrate all the user's secret data" comments.
I never claimed that it would be able to catch all malware, but it beats a human team reading through hundreds or thousands lines of code, for every package, after every update. I believe it can easily point out many types of suspicious additions to existing code.
Re: PyPI: Python packets steal AWS keys from users
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not going to stop people from trying though. If people keep abusing the package managers like this, then publishing open source code is at risk of ending up like distributing binaries on Windows, where you need to fight dozens of virus scanners arbitrarily blocking your code for no apparent reason. Imagine opening a tab in VSCode only to see a popup warning saying it might be harmful, even though you just wrot…
That's exactly was vscode does for me.
Are you talking about this? https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/workspace-trust That's different from how virus scanners work and not exactly what I'm talking about. Even Emacs does that.
Re: PyPI: Python packets steal AWS keys from users
#20I've been building tooling to mitigate supply chain attacks like these. Packj [1] analyzes Python/NPM packages for risky code and attributes such as Network/File permissions, expired email domains, etc. Auditing hundreds of direct/transitive dependencies manually is impractical, but Packj can quickly point out access to sensitive files (e.g., SSH keys), spawning shell, data exfiltration, etc. We found a bunch of mali…
Is it easy to find a list of packages that have been pulled from python/npm in the past? Would be interesting to train some models against it