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Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

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Re: Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

#161

Post by bulbar »

tclancy wrote: post #65
marcus_holmes wrote: post #57

This was always a nightmare waiting to happen. The sheer mass of packages and the consequent vast attack surface for supply chain attacks was always a problem that was eventually going to blow up in everyone's face. But it was too convenient. Anyone warning about it or trying to limit the damage was shouted down by people who had no experience of any other way of doing things. "import antigravity" is just too easy to…

So, to play Pandora, what if the net effect of uncovering all these unknown attack vectors is it actually empties the holsters of every national intelligence service around the world? Just an idea I have been playing with. Say it basically cleans up everything and everyone looking for exploits has to start from scratch except “scratch” is now a place where any useful piece of software has been fuzz tested, property t…

I think it will be an arms race in the future as well. Easier to fix known vulnerabilities automatically, but also easier to find new ones and the occasionally AI fuckup instead of the occasionally human fuckup.

Re: Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

#162

Post by c7b »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #57

This was always a nightmare waiting to happen. The sheer mass of packages and the consequent vast attack surface for supply chain attacks was always a problem that was eventually going to blow up in everyone's face. But it was too convenient. Anyone warning about it or trying to limit the damage was shouted down by people who had no experience of any other way of doing things. "import antigravity" is just too easy to…

My pet theory is that package managers will one day be seen like we see object-oriented programming today. As something that was once popular but that we've since grown out of. It's also a design flaw that I see in cargo/Rust. Having to import 3rd party packages with who-knows-what dependencies to do pretty much anything, from using async to parsing JSON, it's supply chain vulnerability baked into the language philosophy. npm is no better, but I'm mentioning Rust specifically because it's an otherwise security-conscious language.

Re: Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

#163

Post by microtonal »

skydhash wrote: post #35
AgentME wrote: post #16

There's already an okay solution to supply-chain attacks against dependency managers like npm, PyPI, and Cargo: set them to only install package versions that are more than a few days old. The recent high-profile attacks were all caught and rolled back within a day, so doing this would have let you safely avoid the attacks. It really should be the default behavior. Let self-selected beta testers and security scanner…

IMO, the most sustainable version is either the linux distros/bsd ports/homebrew models. You don't push new libraries to the public registry, instead you write a packaging script that gets reviewed for every new changes. Another model is Perl's CPAN where you publish source files only.

Trust me, as someone who has contributed to such a package set, almost nobody is inspecting diffs between upstream versions when updating a package. Only the package definitions themselves are reviewed, but they are typically only version + hash bumps.

Reviewing upstream diffs for every package requires a lot of man hours and most packagers are volunteers. I guess LLMs might help catching some obvious cases.

Re: Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

#165

Post by teiferer »

tclancy wrote: post #65
marcus_holmes wrote: post #57

This was always a nightmare waiting to happen. The sheer mass of packages and the consequent vast attack surface for supply chain attacks was always a problem that was eventually going to blow up in everyone's face. But it was too convenient. Anyone warning about it or trying to limit the damage was shouted down by people who had no experience of any other way of doing things. "import antigravity" is just too easy to…

So, to play Pandora, what if the net effect of uncovering all these unknown attack vectors is it actually empties the holsters of every national intelligence service around the world? Just an idea I have been playing with. Say it basically cleans up everything and everyone looking for exploits has to start from scratch except “scratch” is now a place where any useful piece of software has been fuzz tested, property t…

What we are seeing so far come out of the AI agent era is reduced not increased code quality. The few advances are by far negated by all the slop that's thrown around and that's unlikely to change.

> any useful piece of software has been fuzz tested, property tested and formally verified.

That would require effort. Human effort and extra token cost. Not going to happen, people want to rather move fast an break things.

Re: Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

#166

Post by shakna »

tclancy wrote: post #67
cperciva wrote: post #11

Alternatively, switch to an operating system like FreeBSD which doesn't take a YOLO approach to security. Security fixes don't just get tossed into the FreeBSD kernel without coordination; they go through the FreeBSD security team and we have binary updates (via FreeBSD Update, and via pkgbase for 15.0-RELEASE) published within a couple minutes of the patches hitting the src tree. (Roughly speaking, a few seconds for…

There’s always a guy. It’s great that your favorite distro is definitely safer. An order of magnitude fewer exploits will mean only a few thousand or so, I suppose. Ozymandis used Gentoo.

Well, as they're a FreeBSD dev, I would be surprised if they pointed anyone in a different direction.

Re: Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

#167

Post by Gigachad »

Georgelemental wrote: post #150
Gigachad wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For ios, rebooting your phone is extremely effective at removing exploits. The boot chain attestation stuff can verify the system is in a known state. If you are ultra paranoid you could enable lockdown mode which preemptively disables the entrypoints for exploits. So far I don't believe there has been any exploit which works with lockdown mode enabled.

If you are already exploited though, I doubt it helps

It does though, the exploit exists in memory. When you reboot the phone the memory is reset, if it's modified system files, the checksums won't pass and your phone will refuse to boot. Requiring it to be wiped and reinstalled.

These days most exploits can not persist through a reboot due to secureboot and other bootchain attestations. In the boot process, everything loaded gets checksummed and compared to signed signatures from Apple, but this only helps at load time, not while the phone is running. Of course if the phone is not patched, the exploit could be reloaded, but this would require revising a malicious website or reopening a malicious bit of media.

Re: Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

#168

Post by weregiraffe »

c7b wrote: post #162
marcus_holmes wrote: post #57

This was always a nightmare waiting to happen. The sheer mass of packages and the consequent vast attack surface for supply chain attacks was always a problem that was eventually going to blow up in everyone's face. But it was too convenient. Anyone warning about it or trying to limit the damage was shouted down by people who had no experience of any other way of doing things. "import antigravity" is just too easy to…

My pet theory is that package managers will one day be seen like we see object-oriented programming today. As something that was once popular but that we've since grown out of. It's also a design flaw that I see in cargo/Rust. Having to import 3rd party packages with who-knows-what dependencies to do pretty much anything, from using async to parsing JSON, it's supply chain vulnerability baked into the language philos…

But you can't expect the language std to supply you with every package under the sun.

Re: Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

#169

Post by dguest »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #57

This was always a nightmare waiting to happen. The sheer mass of packages and the consequent vast attack surface for supply chain attacks was always a problem that was eventually going to blow up in everyone's face. But it was too convenient. Anyone warning about it or trying to limit the damage was shouted down by people who had no experience of any other way of doing things. "import antigravity" is just too easy to…

Most people will avoid sticking things in their mouth by default. They don't wait for the microbial cultures to come back positive to say no.

We need a cultural shift toward code hygiene, which isn't really any different from the norms most cultures develop around food. It's a mix of crude heuristics but the sense of "eeew" is keeping billions of people alive.

Re: Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

#170

Post by teiferer »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #82
tclancy wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, to play Pandora, what if the net effect of uncovering all these unknown attack vectors is it actually empties the holsters of every national intelligence service around the world? Just an idea I have been playing with. Say it basically cleans up everything and everyone looking for exploits has to start from scratch except “scratch” is now a place where any useful piece of software has been fuzz tested, property t…

This assumes that there are no new exploits being generated. We're seeing maintainers retreat from maintaining because the amount of AI slop being pushed at them is too much. How many are just going to hand over the maintenance burden to someone else, and how many of those new maintainers are going to be evil? The essential problem is that our entire system of developing civilisation-critical software depends on the…

That is already how it works. The loner hacker in moms basement working for free on his super critical OSS package is largely a myth. The vast majority of OSS code is contributed by companies paying their employees to work on it.
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