21–30 of 494 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happens when everyone adopts this policy? You just change it to two weeks?
You rely on the security companies scanning the packages.
'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only package manager Where This Regularly Happens Edit: some people don't understand that it's a defence to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
All programming language package managers are vulnerable. They all have the exact same caveats as the Arch Linux User Repository. There are no trusted maintainers taking responsibility for things. Any random person can make an account and push packages.
You bring up a good point that this class of problem, or related ones can occur with other package managers. It was frustrating how long it took the Crates.io team (Rust manager) to address name squatting, in what appeared to be a "no perfect solution exists, so we won't act" line of reasoning.
Our company uses yarn 4 which has an option to prevent you from installing an npm package for the first number of days of its release. Most of these seem to be caught within that timeframe (1-3 days). https://gist.github.com/mcollina/b294a6c39ee700d24073c0e5a4e...
uv supports the same for any Python developers out there: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/concepts/resolution/#dependency-co...
So if you have an unpinned version of this package and you run 'npm install', you immediately downloaded the compromised version and that's that.
[0] https://github.com/RedHatInsights/javascript-clients/commit/...
'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only package manager Where This Regularly Happens Edit: some people don't understand that it's a defence to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
All programming language package managers are vulnerable. They all have the exact same caveats as the Arch Linux User Repository. There are no trusted maintainers taking responsibility for things. Any random person can make an account and push packages.
Indeed, AUR is bad as a software distribution mechanism (really it's best understood as a proving ground for baby packages before they get real maintainers and distro blessing), but it's less bad than NPM which puts the malware in the trusted/default/automated path.
'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only package manager Where This Regularly Happens Edit: some people don't understand that it's a defence to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
Cargo,PyPi,Nuget,PHP has had these recent too.
It's not just only NPM. It's frequently repeated here just cause of the average bias against Node.
But this problem isn't isolated to NPM.
'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only package manager Where This Regularly Happens Edit: some people don't understand that it's a defence to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
The big attacks of today are spread across several package ecosystems: TrapDoor and Shai-Hulud have been hitting npm, pypi, composer, and crates with the same malware.
'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only package manager Where This Regularly Happens Edit: some people don't understand that it's a defence to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
All programming language package managers are vulnerable. They all have the exact same caveats as the Arch Linux User Repository. There are no trusted maintainers taking responsibility for things. Any random person can make an account and push packages.
Our company uses yarn 4 which has an option to prevent you from installing an npm package for the first number of days of its release. Most of these seem to be caught within that timeframe (1-3 days). https://gist.github.com/mcollina/b294a6c39ee700d24073c0e5a4e...