Disrupting supply chain attacks on NPM and GitHub Actions

At this rate I'm going to have "npm is by far the worst thing about NodeJS" printed on my gravestone.

In my opinion, things like scanners should not need to exist if npm's parent company, GitHub, were to take responsibility for what was published to npm. If Walmart sells you an item that ends up being a handgrenade there would be hell to pay. In this example, Walmart cannot simply say that Walmart is not in charge of what goes into the item and therefore "buyer beware." Yet, this is precisely what GitHub does with every npm package.

One reasonable approach is to increase the scrutiny for new releases based on how many active downloads of the package there are. So for new packages, maybe there will be not a ton of scrutiny, but for things that are downloaded by millions of users, like Axios, there would be significantly more scrutiny per release.

The epidemic of "not my job" and "[we] don't get paid to do that" is a large contributor to why the world is so messed up. I don't know what to call this phenomenon. In the Hawaiian language there is a word Kuleana which means "sacred responsibility" or "sacred task." If more people took on their Kuleana joyfully we would be inviting the ideal [realm] more rapidly.

My only use of GitHub Actions specifies permissions that only allow it to write to the issue tracker, so if the program it executes (which is the "gh" program) is malicious then the only damage it can cause is to the issue tracker and not to the repository itself (unless GitHub Actions itself is compromised). Furthermore, there are no private files (I do not host private files on remote services such as GitHub), so they can't steal my files either.

I think one thing that would help is to support mutual TLS, with X.509 certificate chains for authentication. This is more secure than personal access tokens and allows you to issue them to yourself and others without needing to login first, including to specify whatever permissions you want to set (as a subset of the permissions of the issuer) and to make them expire. (You could also store the private keys of one certificate on a separate computer not connected to the internet, and use that to issue another one to yourself to use that one instead, and can use a passworded private key as well (an alternative of 2FA), so you can recover even if your certificate you are using does become compromised, or something deletes it (intentionally or not), and can revoke the ones that are compromised.)

Mutual TLS (and even ordinary TLS) won't solve everything, but in combination with other things, including ability to restrict access to what is needed, and avoiding needing too many dependencies (since, programs that need too many dependencies is also one thing that can cause many problems), and many other things, it can be an additional step to help with security.

That is because Github is not a thing anymore. We are talking about Microsoft.

I paid $8 for the recently expired email domain of the sole author of NPM package "foreach", so then control to ship any code I wanted to 70k companies was just a support ticket or password reset away. 72 hours would not make a difference here.

Talked to NPM about this when it went viral, and once again all they could say was enabling package signing, even optionally, would discourage inexperienced people from contributing packages as they would be pressured to learn basic security and key management.

Sorry, if you are unwilling to take 10 minutes to learn how to sign your code, you have no business maintaining software releases millions of people depend on. Full stop.

But NPM will not even make it -optional- and rejects all PRs to implement this going back a decade. So no one feels pressured into basic security. Cool.