Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise

Wow. Another huge package got compromised. I'm going to repost my PSA[0][1] that I posted after Axios and LiteLLM were compromised. The bit about lifecycle scripts apply too:

PSA: npm/bun/pnpm/uv now all support setting a minimum release age for packages. I also have `ignore-scripts=true` in my ~/.npmrc. Based on the analysis, that alone would have mitigated the vulnerability. bun and pnpm do not execute lifecycle scripts by default. Here's how to set global configs to set min release age to 7 days: ~/.config/uv/uv.toml exclude-newer = "7 days"

  ~/.npmrc 
  min-release-age=7 # days
  ignore-scripts=true
  
  ~/Library/Preferences/pnpm/rc
  minimum-release-age=10080 # minutes
  
  ~/.bunfig.toml
  [install]
  minimumReleaseAge = 604800 # seconds

If you do need to override the global setting, you can do so with a CLI flag:

  npm install  --min-release-age 0
  
  pnpm add  --minimum-release-age 0
  
  uv add  --exclude-newer "0 days"
  
  bun add  --minimum-release-age 0

I should add one extra note. There seems to be some concern that the mass adoption of dependency cooldowns will lead to vulnerabilities being caught later, or that using dependency cooldowns is some sort of free-riding. I disagree with that. What you're trading by using dep cooldowns is time preference. Some people will always have a higher time preference than you.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582220

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47513932

I agree with you that TP is an improvement over long lived npm tokens in CI.

However, the threat Im most afraid of still does involve dev environment compromise. Because if your repo admin gets their token stolen from their gh cli, they can trivially undo via API (without a 2fa gate!) any github level gate you have put in place to make TP safe. I want so badly to be wrong about that, we have been evaluating TP in my projects and I want to use it. But without a second factor to promote a release, at the end of the day if you have TP configured and your repo admin gets pwned, you cannot stop a TP release unless you race their publish and disable TP at npm.

TP is amazing at removing long lived npm tokens from CI, but the class of compromise that historically has plagued the ecosystem does not at all depend on the token being long lived, it depends on an attacker getting a token which doesnt require 2fa.

I am begging for someone to prove me wrong about this, not to be a shit, but because I really want to find a secure way to use TP in lodash, express, body-parser, cors, etc

Realistically if you have installed malware, you need to do a full wipe of your computer anyway.

QubesOS had the right idea. You want layers and layers of security, with multiple VMs at the root.

The way I see it - if you're pushing a change to an NPM package with more than [N] daily downloads/downstream packages, and you don't have a human online who's able to approve a two-factor for the release on their phone... then you also don't have a human online who's able to hotfix or rollback in case of a breaking bug, much less a compromise. Even setting security aside - that's in service of a stable ecosystem.

And the two-factor approver should see a human-written changelog message alongside an AI summary of what was changed, that goes deeply into any updated dependencies. No sneaking through with "emergency bugfix" that also bumps a dependency that was itself social-engineered. Stop the splash radius, and disincentivize all these attacks.

Edit: to the MSFT folks who think of the stock ticker name first and foremost - you'd be able to say that your AI migration tools emit "package suggestions that embed enterprise-grade ecosystem security" when they suggest NPM packages. You've got customers out there who still have security concerns in moving away from their ancient Java codebases. Give them a reason to trust your ecosystem, or they'll see news articles like this one and have the opposite conclusion.