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I’m not sure language package mangers were a good idea at all. Dependencies were supposed to be painful. If the language needed some functionality built in it was supposed to go into the standard library, I understand that for JS this isn’t feasible.
I’m not sure language package mangers were a good idea at all. Dependencies were supposed to be painful. If the language needed some functionality built in it was supposed to go into the standard library, I understand that for JS this isn’t feasible.
In general, I agree with the idea that writing everything yourself results in a higher quantity of low quality software with security issues and bugs, as well as a waste of developers' time. That said, clearly supply chain attacks are a very real threat that needs to be addressed. I just don't think eliminating package managers is a good solution.
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> So many websites just display text and images Eh... This over-generalises a bit. That can be said of anything really, including native desktop applications.
Is that true? The things people use native desktop applications for nowadays tend to be exactly those which aren't just neat content displays. Spreadsheets, terminals, text-editors, CAD software, compilers, video games, photo-editing software. The only things I can think of that I use as just text/image displays are the file-explorer and image/media-viewer apps, of which there are really only a handful on any given O…
I'm surprised this is happening now, and not 10 years ago.
NPM gets a lot of traffic, there might be other package managers out there, in different languages, that may have been infected in the past and simply don't get the same amount of eyeballs.
As a developer, is there a way on mac to limit npm file access to the specific project? So that if you install a compromised package it cannot access any data outside of your project directory?
I've never tried any of them but there's also a few wrappers specifically to do that, such as: https://github.com/berstend/node-safe
Otherwise you're down to docker or virtualisation or creating one system user per project...
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Most dependencies do much more than we need from them. Often it means we only need one or a few functions from them. This means one doesn't need to rewrite whole dependencies usually. Don't use dependencies for things you can trivially write yourself, and use them for cases where it would be too much work to write yourself.
A brief but important point is that this primarily holds true in the context of rewriting/vendoring utilities yourself, not when discussing importing small vs. large dependencies. Just because dependencies do a lot more than you need, doesn't mean you should automatically reach for the smallest dependency that fits your needs. If you need 5 of the dozens of Lodash functions, for instance, it might be best to just ins…
This happens because there's no auditing of new packages or versions. The distro's maintainer and the developer is the same person. The general solution is to do what Debian does. Keep a stable distro where new packages aren't added and versions change rarely (security updates and bugfixes only, no new functionality). This is what most people use. Keep a testing/unstable distro where new packages and new versions can…
Linux distros can't even provide all the apps users want, that's why freshmeat existed and we have linuxbrew, flatpak, Ubuntu multiverse, PPA, third party Debian repositories, the openSUSE Buildservice, the AUR, ...
There is no community that has the capacity to audit and support multiple branches of libraries.
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Even if we didn't have post install scripts wouldn't the malware just run as soon as you imported the module into your code during the build process, server startup, testing, etc? I can't think of an instance where I ran npm install and didn't run some process shortly after that imported the packages.
Many people have non-JS backends and only use npm for frontend dependencies. If a postinstall script runs in a dev or build environment it could get access to a lot of things that wouldn't be available when the package is imported in a browser or other production environment.
As a user of npm-hosted packages in my own projects, I'm not really sure what to do to protect myself. It's not feasible for me to audit every single one of my dependencies, and every one of my dependencies' dependencies, and so on. Even if I had the time to do that, I'm not a typescript/javascript expert, and I'm certain there are a lot of obfuscated things that an attacker could do that I wouldn't realize was embed…
The problem with this approach is you need a certain number of guinea pigs on the bleeding edge or the outcome is the same (just delayed). There is no way for anyone involved to ensure that balance is maintained. Reducing your surface area is a much more effective strategy.
It's crazy to me that npm still executes postinstall scripts by default for all dependencies. Other package managers (Pnpm, Bun) do not run them for dependencies unless they are added to a specific allow-list. Composer never runs lifecycle scripts for dependencies. This matters because dependencies are often installed in a build or development environment with access to things that are not available when the package…
I'm also wondering why huge scale attacks like this don't happen for other package managers. Like, for rust, you can have a build.rs file that gets executed when your crate is compiled, I don't think it's sandboxed. Or also on other languages that will get run on development machines, like python packages (which can trigger code only on import), java libraries, etc... Like, there is the post install script issue or c…