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Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

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Re: Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

#741

Post by lelanthran »

cyco130 wrote: post #459
afavour wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irony is that Node has no need for Axios, native fetch support has been there for years, so in terms of network requests it is batteries included.

I'm not sure fetch is a good server-side API. The typical fetch-based code snippet `fetch(API_URL).then(r => r.json())` has no response body size limit and can potentially bring down a server due to memory exhaustion if the endpoint at API_URL malfunctions for some reason. Fine in the browser but to me it should be a no-no on the server.

> I'm not sure fetch is a good server-side API. The typical fetch-based code snippet `fetch(API_URL).then(r => r.json())` has no response body size limit and can potentially bring down a server due to memory exhaustion if the endpoint at API_URL malfunctions for some reason. Fine in the browser but to me it should be a no-no on the server.

Nor is fetch a good client-side API either; you want progress indicators, on both upload and download. Fetch is a poor API all-round.

Re: Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

#742

Post by OJFord »

stratos123 wrote: post #356
mixedbit wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check also https://github.com/wrr/drop which is a higher-level tool than bwrap. It allows you to make such isolated sandboxes with minimal configuration.

This looks nice but I wouldn't trust a very fresh tool to do security correctly. As a higher-level alternative to bwrap, I sometimes use `flatpak run --filesystem=$PWD --command=bash org.freedesktop.Platform`. This is kind of an abuse of flatpaks but works just fine to make a sandbox. And unlike bwrap, it has sane defaults (no extra permissions, not even network, though it does allow xdg-desktop-portal).

Shame it's not a bit more mature, it does look like more the sort of thing I want. I use firejail a bit, but it's a bit awkward really.

To be honest - and I can't really believe I'm saying it - what I really want is something more like Android permissions. (Except more granular file permissions, which Android doesn't do at all well.) Like: start with nothing, app is requesting x access, allow it this time; oh alright fine always allow it. Central place to manage it later. Etc.

Re: Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

#743

Post by ArcHound »

themafia wrote: post #714
habinero wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of libraries are maintained by a single person.

Are those the ones typically involved in supply chain attacks? There are no perfect solutions; but, let's be reasonable.

Actually, yes, they are the prime targets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident or seemingly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor as well.

Re: Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

#744

Post by lelanthran »

hectdev wrote: post #496
bbkane wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the AI tooling is, if not completely solving sandboxing, at least making the default much better by asking you every time they want to do something and providing files to auto-approve certain actions. Package managers should do the same thing

Another layer of AI tooling is the cost of spinning up your own version of some libraries is lowered and can be made hyper specific to your needs rather than pulling in a whole library with features you'll never use.

> Another layer of AI tooling is the cost of spinning up your own version of some libraries is lowered and can be made hyper specific to your needs rather than pulling in a whole library with features you'll never use.

Tell me about it. Using AI Chatbots (not even agents), I got a MVP of a packaging system[1] to my liking (to create packages for a proprietary ERP system) and an endpoint-API-testing tool, neither of which require a venv or similar to run.

------------------------------

[1] Okay, all it does now is create, sign, verify and unpack packages. There's a roadmap file for package distribution, which is a different problem.

Re: Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

#745

Post by apitman »

zachrip wrote: post #546
pier25 wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People use axios or ky because with fetch you inevitably end up writing a small wrapper on top of it anyway.

Fetch has also lacked support for features that xhr has had for over a decade now. For example upload progress. It's slowly catching up though, upload progress is the only thing I'd choose xhr for.

You can pipe through a TransformStream that counts how many bytes you've uploaded, right?

Re: Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

#746

Post by lelanthran »

estebank wrote: post #697
gjadi wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vendoring means you don't have to fetch the internet for every build, that you can work offline, that you're not at the mercy of the oh-so-close-99.999 availability, that it will keep on working in 10 years, and probably other advantages. If your tooling can pull a dependency from the internet, it could certainly check if more recent version from a vendored one is available.

Is there any package manager incapable of working offline?

> Is there any package manager incapable of working offline?

I think you've identified the problem here: package management and package distribution are two different problems. Both tools have possibilities for exploits, but if they are separate tools then the surface area is smaller.

I'm thinking that the package distribution tool maintains a local system cache of packages, using keys/webrings/whatever to verify provenance, while the package management tool allows pinning, minver/maxver, etc.

Re: Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

#747

Post by kube-system »

nathancahill wrote: post #732
kube-system wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are the kind of people I hope AI replaces

AI was trained on Axios wrappers, so it's just going to be wrappers all the way down. Look inside any company "API Client" and it's just a branded wrapper around Axios.

Speak for yourself, Claude works fine with fetch on my system.

Re: Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

#748

Post by mayhemducks »

kjok wrote: post #708
mayhemducks wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming you are talking about agents like claude-code and open-code which rely on GPT functions (AKA Large Language Models). The reason they don't detect these risks is primarily because these risks are emergent, and happen overnight (literally in the case of axios - compromised at night). Axios has a good reputation. It is by definition impossible for a pre-trained LLM to keep up with time-sensitive changes.

I mean that agents can scan the code to find anything "suspicious". After all, security vendors that claim to "detect" malware in packages are relying on LLMs for detection.

An LLM is not a suitable substitute for purpose-built SAST software in my opinion. In my experience, they are great at looking at logs, error messages, sifting through test output, and that sort of thing. But I don't think they're going to be too reliable at detecting malware via static analysis. They just aren't built for that.

Re: Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

#749

Post by [deleted] »

rhdunn wrote: post #674
bob1029 wrote: post #241

"Batteries included" ecosystems are the only persistent solution to the package manager problem. If your first party tooling contains all the functionality you typically need, it's possible you can be productive with zero 3rd party dependencies. In practice you will tend to have a few, but you won't be vendoring out critical things like HTTP, TCP, JSON, string sanitation, cryptography. These are beacons for attackers…

There are several issues with "Batteries Included" ecosystems (like Python, C#/.NET, and Java): 1. They are not going to include everything. This includes things like new file formats. 2. They are going to be out of date whenever a standard changes (HTML, etc.), application changes (e.g. SQLite/PostgreSQL/etc. for SQL/ORM bindings), or API changes (DirectX, Vulcan, etc.). 3. Things like data structures, graphics APIs…

[deleted]

Re: Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

#750

Post by shreyssh »

sersi wrote: post #289
shreyssh wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

But wouldn't the type of people that notifes anomalous network activity be exactly the type of people who add a 7 day delay because they're security conscious?

[flagged]
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