131–140 of 145 posts
Where is the fbi in this? Why has no one been arrested? This is a massive crime.
And Russia doesn't give a damn, as they literally gave APT28/29 the mandate to do this, the only exception being that no former Sovjet territories can be attacked.
(With the current exception of Ukraine ofc).
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A compromised device still can't access the secure enclave.
It doesn't need to, it just updates the code, you have the human publish.
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What's your solution to using a library without executing the code in it?
This is moving the goalposts. The original problem was that installing a library should not execute code from that library. In most sane environments, like for example native languages, this is already the case. Downloading a .dll file and putting it in an appropriate directory won't, by itself, execute code in that library. You may argue that the code will get executed at some point anyway, but that's besides the po…
Installing a node package is much more like compiling a dll, not downloading it. The same is true for most package managers that exist for C and C++ as languages as opposed to for an OS. These are two different tools for different use-cases. (though still pretty much all installation processes for all OSs involve an opportunity for arbitrary code execution, as well, apart from just downloading a zip file and extracting it, which is not the norm)
Once again, I ask myself: should we start "shaming" developers who don't use isolation? It still seems I am the exception and most people run their dev environment with full permissions. Why? I also wrote an article ( https://evertheylen.eu/p/shame-devs-without-isolation/ ) to flesh out my thoughts, but I'd be really happy to discuss this in the comments.
I think it’s premature before a lot of tools improve to make that more workable: for example, if you use AWS how realistic is maintain separate IAM for each tool you run and map the right one into a sandbox for each tool? To use your editor’s GitHub integration with a token which can do basic operations and only retrieves a high-privilege token with a hardware presence check when you cut a release? Theoretically you…
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Defence in depth is not just 'throw anything in that might improve security' though. The idea is to have multiple strong layers, not a hundred half-measures that are all easily bypassed. A stronger layer might be sandboxing, or separating your build and publishing steps as others have suggested (and also probably worth restricting the credentials the publishing step to just the relevant packages as well). These will…
>The idea is to have multiple strong layers, not a hundred half-measures that are all easily bypassed Definitely. On the other hand, in my opinion, "not running arbitrary code during package install" is not a "half-measure", it's a basic sanity. This whole arbitrary code execution at install time is a convenience feature that was adapted by some package managers, but it was never a good idea. Fortunately, nixos solve…
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Feel free to turn it off yourself, just don't be surprised when the attackers switch tactics. And don't make life harder for everyone else by pushing it as mandatory. (if you want a better mitigation: don't automatically update dependencies in CI. At a minimum have a cooling-off period that you only bypass on manual review. This is not hard to implement and at least gives some time for alarm bells to be sounded befor…
I mostly use languages where the feature doesn't even exist. We don't generally miss it. I also blocked a proposed mandatory dependabot at work a few months back because I didn't like the way it created a pipeline for any hacker to push a hacked dependency straight into someone's codebase. I'm lifting my objection now that dependabot is defaulting to a 3-day cooldown, though the code bases I'm managing I'm setting to…
You can see my other responses in this thread about what I think of this in the context of defence in depth. I think disabling install hooks is a very weak defence with substantial downsides and defence in depth does not mean just taking every option that might foil some attack. There are much better means to get a robust extra layer of defence in this context, which is mainly about protecting your publishing pipelines from become a vector for a worm.
Couldn't GitHub detect a Shai-Hulud exfil repo being created and just... block it? Given that it's a worm, the attacker wouldn't be able to adapt all that quickly.
We're talking about Microsoft, who created a notepad.exe that can run an RCE with an LLM bypass prompt. In the previous Miasma waves, Microsoft was so overwhelmed that they delayed the VSCode extension installs for a couple days with a timeout; literally not understanding what was going on and neither how the malware was spreading.
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I think it’s premature before a lot of tools improve to make that more workable: for example, if you use AWS how realistic is maintain separate IAM for each tool you run and map the right one into a sandbox for each tool? To use your editor’s GitHub integration with a token which can do basic operations and only retrieves a high-privilege token with a hardware presence check when you cut a release? Theoretically you…
Could you not use something like https://github.com/superfly/tokenizer for AWS? They list it as an explicit example, but I have little experience with AWS.
We absolutely should be trying to get to the point where it’s easy - this is like software deployment before containers and shouldn’t be.
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It’s not that there’s a single stdlib feature which would’ve stopped this but more that JavaScript developers have been conditioned that it’s normal to install tons of packages and update them quite frequently so there are a lot of individual maintainers who if compromised have a surprising impact. You’re exposed as a function of the number of dependencies so the communities which most normalize many rapidly updating…
I just don't think that this is that unique to javascript, it's absolutely not about npm, and I don't think that this is well supported as a relevant feature that leads to these attacks.
https://arxiv.org/html/2512.14739v1
Again, this is about culture rather than some innate flaw. Dependencies are about trust and I suspect that future developers are going to be amazed at how casually people ran code from strangers, similar to how stories about unprotected 70s swinger parties sound incredibly reckless to almost people who grew up after decades of HIV awareness campaigns.
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I just don't think that this is that unique to javascript, it's absolutely not about npm, and I don't think that this is well supported as a relevant feature that leads to these attacks.
Nobody is saying NPM is unique - it’s one end of a spectrum but that doesn’t mean everything else is completely on the other end - for example, this study found Maven projects having almost as many dependencies on average as NPM, both well ahead of everything else: https://arxiv.org/html/2512.14739v1 Again, this is about culture rather than some innate flaw. Dependencies are about trust and I suspect that future deve…
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