ProTip: use PNPM, not NPM. PNPM 10.x shutdown a lot of these attack vectors. 1. Does not default to running post-install scripts (must manually approve each) 2. Let's you set a min age for new releases before `pnpm install` will pull them in - e.g. 4 days - so publishers have time to cleanup. NPM is too insecure for production CLI usage. And of course make a very limited scope publisher key, bind it to specific packa…
I've by now grown to like Hashicorp Vaults/OpenBao's dynamic secret management for this. It's a bit complicated to understand and get to work at first, but it's powerful:
You mirror/model the lifetime of a secret user as a lease. For example, a nomad allocation/kubernetes pod gets a lease when it is started and the lease gets revoked immediately after it is stopped. We're kinda discussing if we could have this in CI as well - create a lease for a build, destroy the lease once the build is over. This also supports ttl, ttl-refreshes and enforced max-ttls for leases.
With that in place, you can tie dynamically issued secrets to this lease and the secrets are revoked as soon as the lease is terminated or expires. This has confused developers with questionable practices a lot. You can print database credentials in your production job, run that into a local database client, but as soon as you deploy a new version, those secrets are deleted. It also gives you automated, forced database credential rotation for free through the max_ttl, including a full audit log of all credential accesses and refreshes.
I know that would be a lot of infrastructure for a FOSS project by Bob from Novi Zagreb. But with some plugin-work, for a company, it should be possible to hide long-term access credentials in Vault and supply CI builds with dropped, enforced, short-lived tokens only.
As much as I hate running after these attacks, they are spurring interesting security discussions at work, which can create actual security -- not just checkbox-theatre.