671–680 of 1001 posts
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C library is smaller than Node.js (you won’t have HTTP). What C have is much more respectable libraries. If you add libcurl or freetype to your project, it won’t pull the whole jungle with them.
You can add curl to a Rust project too.
Time to add developer ID's verification /s
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Personally, I go further than this and just never update dependencies unless the dependency has a bug that affects my usage of it. Vulnerabilities are included. It is insane to me how many developers update dependencies in a project regularly. You should almost never be updating dependencies, when you do it should be because it fixes a bug (including a security issue) that you have in your project, or a new feature t…
Then you run the risk of drifting so much behind that when you actually have to upgrade it becomes a gargantuan task. Both ends of the scale have problems.
In NPM world, there's so much churn that it would be comical if not for the security aspects.
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I recently started using npm for an application where there’s no decent alternative ecosystem. The signal desktop app is an electron app. Presumably it has the same problem. Does anyone know of any reasonable approaches to using npm securely? “Reduce your transitive dependencies” is not a reasonable suggestion. It’s similar to “rewrite all the Linux kernel modules you need from scratch” or “go write a web browser”.
Most big tech companies maintain their own NPM registry that only includes approved packages. If you need a new package available in that registry you have to request it. A security team will then review that package and its deps and add it to the list of approved packages… I would love to have something like that "in the open"…
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…
> It's not feasible for me to audit every single one of my dependencies, and every one of my dependencies' dependencies I think this is a good argument for reducing your dependency count as much as possible, and keeping them to well-known and trustworthy (security-wise) creators. "Not-invented-here" syndrome is counterproductive if you can trust all authors, but in an uncontrolled or unaudited ecosystem it's actually…
I wonder to which extent is the extreme dependency count a symptom of a standard library that is too minimalistic for the ecosystem's needs.
Perhaps this issue could be addressed by a "version set" approach to bundling stable npm packages.
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> It's not feasible for me to audit every single one of my dependencies, and every one of my dependencies' dependencies I think this is a good argument for reducing your dependency count as much as possible, and keeping them to well-known and trustworthy (security-wise) creators. "Not-invented-here" syndrome is counterproductive if you can trust all authors, but in an uncontrolled or unaudited ecosystem it's actually…
If it's not feasible to audit every single dependency, it's probably even less feasible to rewrite every single dependency from scratch. Avoiding that duplicated work is precisely why we import dependencies in the first place.
There is no need to rewrite dependencies. Sometimes it just so happens that a project can live without outputting fancy colorful text to stdout, or doesn't need to spread transitive dependencies on debug utilities. Perhaps these concerns should be a part of the standard library, perhaps these concerns are useless.
And don't get me started on bullshit polyfill packages. That's an attack vector waiting to be exploited.
Is there a theoretical framework that can prevent this from happening? Proof-carrying code?
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…
Detecting outbound network connection during an npm install is quite cheap to implement in 2025. I think it comes down to tenant and incentives, if security is placed as first priority as it should, for any computing service and in particular for supply chain like package management, this would be built in.
One thing that comes to mind that would make it a months long deabte is the potential breakage of many packages. In that case as a first step just make an eye catching summary post install, with gradual push to totally restriction with something like a strict mode, we've done this before.
Which, reminds me of another long standing issue with node ecosystem toolings, information overload. It's easy to bombard devs with thesis character count then blame them for eventually getting fatigue and not reading the output. It takes effort to summarize what's most important with layered expansion of detail level, show some.