Pnpm has a new setting to stave off supply chain attacks

198 pointsposted 16 hours ago
by ivanb
(pnpm.io)

127 Comments

postepowanieadm

15 hours ago

If everyone is going to wait 3 days before installing the latest version of a compromised package, it will take more than 3 days to detect an incident.

acdha

11 hours ago

Think about how the three major recent incidents were caught: not by individual users installing packages but by security companies running automated scans on new uploads flagging things for audits. This would work quite well in that model, and it’s cheap in many cases where there isn’t a burning need to install something which just came out.

kjok

7 hours ago

I think there's some confusion here. No automated scan was able to catch the attack. It was an individual who notified these startups.

acdha

6 hours ago

Quite possibly - there have been several incidents recently and a number of researchers working together so it’s not clear exactly who found something first and it’s definitely not as simple to fix as tossing a tool in place.

The CEO of socket.dev described an automated pipeline flagging new uploads for analysts, for example, which is good but not instantaneous:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45257681

The Aikido team also appear to be suggesting they investigated a suspicious flag (apologies if I’m misreading their post), which again needs time for analysts to work:

https://www.aikido.dev/blog/npm-debug-and-chalk-packages-com...

My thought was simply that these were caught relatively quickly by security researchers rather than by compromised users reporting breaches. If you didn’t install updates with a relatively short period of time after they were published, the subsequent response would keep you safe. Obviously that’s not perfect and a sophisticated, patient attack like liblzma suffered would likely still be possible but there really does seem to be a value to having something like Debian’s unstable/stable divide where researchers and thrill-seekers would get everything ASAP but most people would give it some time to be tested. What I’d really like to see is a community model for funding that and especially supporting independent researchers.

nikanj

5 hours ago

Automated scans have detected 72251 out of the previous 3 supply-chain attacks

davidpfarrell

3 hours ago

Wow so couldn't said security co's establish their own registry that we could point to instead and packages would only get updated after they reviewed and approved them?

I mean I'd prolly be okay paying yearly fee for access to such a registry.

anematode

15 hours ago

A lot of people will still use npm, so they'll be the canaries in the coal mine :)

More seriously, automated scanners seem to do a good job already of finding malicious packages. It's a wonder that npm themselves haven't already deployed an automated countermeasure.

kjok

7 hours ago

> automated scanners seem to do a good job already of finding malicious packages.

That's not true. This latest incident was detected by an individual researcher, just like many similar attacks in the past. Time and again, it's been people who flagged these issues, later reported to security startups, not automated tools. Don't fall for the PR spin.

If automated scanning were truly effective, we'd see deployments across all major package registries. The reality is, these systems still miss what vigilant humans catch.

anematode

5 hours ago

The latest incident was detected first by an individual researcher (haven't verified this myself, but trusting you here) -- or maybe s/he was just the fastest reporter in the west. Even simple heuristics like the sudden addition of high-entropy code would have caught the most recent attacks, and obviously there are much better methods too.

hobofan

7 hours ago

> If automated scanning were truly effective, we'd see deployments across all major package registries.

No we wouldn't. Most package registries are run by either bigcorps at a loss or by community maintainers (with bigcorps again sponsoring the infrastructure).

And many of them barely go beyond the "CRUD" of package publishing due to lack of resources. The economic incentives of building up supply chain security tools into the package registries themselves are just not there.

kjok

6 hours ago

You're right that registries are under-resourced. But, if automated malware scanning actually worked, we'd already see big tech partnering with package registries to run continuous, ecosystem-wide scanning and detection pipelines. However, that isn't happening. Instead, we see piecemeal efforts from Google with assurance artifacts (SLSA provenance, SBOMs, verifiable builds), Microsoft sponsoring OSS maintainers, Facebook donating to package registries. Google's initiatives stop short of claiming they can automatically detect malware.

This distinction matters. Malware detection is, in the general case, an undecidable problem (think halting problem and Rice theorem). No amount of static or dynamic scanning can guarantee catching malicious logic in arbitrary code. At best, scanners detect known signatures, patterns, or anomalies. They can't prove absence of malicious behavior.

So the reality is: if Google's assurance artifacts stop short of claiming automated malware detection is feasible, it's a stretch for anyone else to suggest registries could achieve it "if they just had more resources." The problem space itself is the blocker, not just lack of infra or resources.

mcintyre1994

13 hours ago

In the case of the chalk/debug etc hack, the first detection seemed to come from a CI build failure it caused: https://jdstaerk.substack.com/p/we-just-found-malicious-code...

> It started with a cryptic build failure in our CI/CD pipeline, which my colleague noticed

> This seemingly minor error was the first sign of a sophisticated supply chain attack. We traced the failure to a small dependency, error-ex. Our package-lock.json specified the stable version 1.3.2 or newer, so it installed the latest version 1.3.3, which got published just a few minutes earlier.

DougBTX

11 hours ago

> Our package-lock.json specified the stable version 1.3.2 or newer

Is that possible? I thought the lock files restricted to a specific version with an integrity check hash. Is it possible that it would install a newer version which doesn't match the hash in the lock file? Do they just mean package.json here?

streptomycin

10 hours ago

If they were for some reason doing `npm install` rather than `npm ci`, then `npm install` does update packages in the lock file. Personally I always found that confusing, and yarn/pnpm don't behave that way. I think most people do `npm ci` in CI, unless they are using CI to specifically test if `npm install` still works, which I guess maybe would be a good idea if you use npm since it doesn't like obeying the lock file.

Rockslide

10 hours ago

How does this get repeated over and over, when it's simply not true? At least not anymore. npm install will only update the lockfile if you make changes to your package.json. Otherwise, it will install the versions from the lockfile.

mirashii

7 hours ago

> How does this get repeated over and over, when it's simply not true?

Well, for one, the behavior is somewhat insane.

`npm install` with no additional arguments does update the lockfile if your package.json and your lockfile are out of sync with one another for any reason, and so to get a guarantee that it doesn't change your lockfile, you must do additional configuration or guarantee by some external mechanism that you don't ever have an out of date package.json and lock. For this reason alone, the advice of "just don't use npm install, use npm ci instead" is still extremely valid, you'd really like this to fail fast if you get out of sync.

`npm install additional-package` also updates your lock file. Other package managers distinguish these two operations, with the one to add a new dependency being called "add" instead of "install".

The docs add to the confusion. https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v11/commands/npm-install#save suggests that writing to package-lock.json is the default and you need to change configuration to disable it. The notion that it won't change your lock file if you're already in sync between package.json and package-lock.json is not actually spelled out clearly anywhere on the page.

> At least not anymore.

You've partially answered your own question here.

Rockslide

7 hours ago

> You've partially answered your own question here.

Is that the case? If it were ever true (outside of outright bugs in npm), it must have been many many years and major npm releases ago. So that doesn't justify brigading outdated information.

chowells

5 hours ago

I mean, it's my #1 experience using npm. I never once have used `npm install` and had a result other than it changing the lockfile. Maybe you want to blame this on the tools I used, but I followed the exact installation instructions of the project I was working on. If it's that common to get it "wrong", it's the tool that is wrong.

streptomycin

5 hours ago

My bad, it really annoyed me when npm stopped respecting lockfiles years ago so I stopped using it. That's great news that they eventually changed their mind.

However in rare cases where I am forced to use it to contribute to some npm-using project, I have noticed that the lockfile often gets updated and I get a huge diff even though I didn't edit the dependencies. So I've always assumed that was the same issue with npm ignoring the lockfile, but maybe it's some other issue? idk

Rockslide

4 hours ago

Well there are other lockfile updates as well, which aren't dependency version changes either. e.g. if the lockfile was created with an older npm version, running npm install with a newer npm version might upgrade it to a newer lockfile format and thus result in huge diffs. But that wouldn't change anything about the versions used for your dependencies.

cluckindan

8 hours ago

Are you 100% on that?

Rockslide

7 hours ago

Yes. As someone who's using npm install daily, and given the update cadence of npm packages, I would end up with dirty lock files very frequently if the parent statement were true. It just doesn't happen.

hobofan

7 hours ago

Since nobody else answers your question:

> Do they just mean package.json here?

Yes, most likely. A package-lock.json always specifies an exact version with hash and not a "version X or newer".

Mattwmaster58

10 hours ago

> Is that possible?

This comes up every time npm install is discussed. Yes, npm install will "ignore" your lockfile and install the latest dependancies it can that satisfy the constraints of your package.json. Yes, you should use npm clean-install. One shortcoming is the implementation insists on deleteing the entire node_modules folder, so package installs can actually take quite a bit of time, even when all the packages are being served from the npm disk cache: https://github.com/npm/cli/issues/564

kibwen

11 hours ago

Also, if everyone is going to wait 3 days before installing the latest version of a compromised package, it will take more than 3 days to broadly disseminate the fix for a compromise in the wild. The knife cuts both ways.

blamestross

12 hours ago

1) Checks and audits will still happen (if they are happening at all)

2) Real chances for owners to notice they have been compromised

3) Adopt early before that commons is fully tragedy-ed.

omnicognate

15 hours ago

Should have included the units in the name or required a choice of unit to be selected as part of the value. Sorry, just a bugbear of mine.

zokier

15 hours ago

Or just use ISO8601 standard notation (e.g. "P1D" for one day)

johanyc

7 hours ago

TIL ISO8601 also standardizes duration

1oooqooq

11 hours ago

or PT1400M or P0.5DT700M?

oh, you can use commas too.

and if you're still not thinking this is fun, here's a quote from Wikipedia "But keep in mind that "PT36H" is not the same as "P1DT12H" when switching from or to Daylight saving time."

just add a unit to your period parameters. sigh.

brewmarche

2 hours ago

Maybe surprising for days (could also happen with minutes because of leap seconds technically :-) but for months and years this is more apparent due to month ends and leap years.

fzeindl

15 hours ago

ISO8601 durations should be used, like PT3M.

mort96

12 hours ago

Oh wow, never looked at ISO8601 durations before and I had no idea they were this ugly. Please, no, don't make me deal with ISO8601. I'd rather write a number of seconds or a format like 'X weeks' or 'Y hours Z minutes'x ISO8601 looks exclusively like a data interchange format

johanyc

7 hours ago

https://docs.digi.com/resources/documentation/digidocs/90001...

It's pretty simple actually.

> 'X weeks' or 'Y hours Z minutes'

PxW, PTyHzM. So simple that I learned it in a few seconds.

mort96

3 hours ago

I learned it too. It's just ugly. Before I looked at the relevant section of the ISO 8601 duration format yesterday, I didn't know it. After I looked at it, I now know it, and I strongly dislike it.

cluckindan

8 hours ago

When in doubt, use only seconds. PT86400S

aa-jv

14 hours ago

Should be easy, just add the ISO8601-duration package to your project ..

/s

the_mitsuhiko

13 hours ago

I think uv should get some credit for being an early supporter of this. They originally added it as a hidden way to create stable fixtures for their own tests, but it has become a pretty popular flag to use.

This for instance will only install packages that are older than 14 days:

uv sync --exclude-newer $(date -u -v-14d '+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ')

It's great to see this kind of stuff being adopted in more places.

mcintyre1994

13 hours ago

Nice, but I think the config file is a much better implementation for protecting against supply chain attacks, particularly those targeting developers rather than runtime. You don’t want to rely on every developer passing a flag every time they install. This does suffer from the risk of using `npm install` instead of `pnpm install` though.

It would also be nice to have this as a flag so you can use it on projects that haven't configured it though, I wonder if that could be added too.

ramses0

11 hours ago

Just Minimum Version Selection in conjunction with "Minimum non-Vulnerable Version" (and this "--minAge") would do a lot, and effectively suss out a lot of poorly/casually maintained packages (eg: "finished" ones).

https://research.swtch.com/vgo-mvs#upgrade_timing

MVS makes tons of sense that you shouldn't randomly uptake "new" packages that haven't been "certified" by package maintainers in their own dependencies.

In the case of a vulnerable sub-dependency, you're effectively having to "do the work" to certify that PackageX is compatible with PackageY, and "--minAge" gives industry (and maintainers) time to scan before insta-pwning anyone who is unlucky that day.

cap11235

11 hours ago

You can put the uv setting in pyproject.toml or uv.toml.

fainpul

10 hours ago

But then you have to hardcode a timestamp, since this is not gonna work in uv.toml:

  exclude-newer = $(date -uv -14d '+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ')

mcintyre1994

11 hours ago

Nice, supporting both definitely seems ideal.

OskarS

15 hours ago

I have a question: when I’ve seen people discussing this setting, people talk about using like ”3 days” or ”7 days” as the timeout, which seems insanely short to me for production use. As a C++ developer, I would be hesitant to use any dependency in the first six months of release in production, unless there’s some critical CVE or something (then again, we make client side applications with essentially no networking, so security isn’t as critical for us, stability is much more important).

Does the JS ecosystem really move so fast that you can’t wait a month or two before updating your packages?

diegof79

11 hours ago

Transitive dependencies are the main issue.

Suppose you have a package P1 with version 1.0.0 that depends on D1 with version ^1.0.0. The “^” indicates a range query. Without going into semver details, it helps update D1 automatically for minor patches or non-breaking feature additions.

In your project, everything looks fine as P1 is pinned to 1.0.0. Then, you install P2 that also uses D1. A new patch version of D1 (1.0.1) was released. The package manager automatically upgrades to 1.0.1 because it matches the expression ^1.0.0, as specified by P1 and P2 authors.

This can lead to surprises. JS package managers use lock files to prevent changes during installs. However, they still change the lock file for additions or manual version upgrades, resolving to newer minor dependencies if the version range matches. This is often desirable for bug fixes and security updates. But, it opens the door to this type of attack.

To answer your question, yes, the JS ecosystem moves faster, and pkg managers make it easy to create small libraries. This results in many “small” libraries as transitive dependencies. Rewriting these libraries with your own code works for simple cases like left-pad, but you can’t rewrite a webserver or a build tool that also has many small transitive dependencies. For example, the chalk library is used by many CLI tools to show color output.

progx

15 hours ago

Yes, but this is not only JS dependent, in PHP (composer) is the same.

Normally old major or minor packages don't get an update, only the latest.

E.g. 4.1.47 (no update), 4.2.1 (yes got update).

So if the problem is in 4.1 you must "upgrade" to 4.2.

With "perfect" semver, this shouldn't be a problem, cause 4.2 only add new features... but... back to reality, the world is not perfect.

dtech

12 hours ago

Waiting 6 months to upgrade a dependency seems crazy, that's definitely not a thing in other languages or maybe companies. (It might be due to priorization, but not due to some rule of thumb)

In the JVM ecosystem it's quite common to have Dependabot or Renovate automatically create PRs for dependency upgrades withing a few hours of it being released. If it's manual it highly irregular and depends on the company.

slowroll22

10 hours ago

For a previous place I worked - on some of our products 6 months was the minimum - and explicitly a year for a few of the dependencies.

The main deciding factors were the process and frequency it was released / upgraded by us or our customers.

The on-prem installs had the longest delay because once it was out there it was harder for us to address issues. Some customers also had a change freeze in place once things have been approved which was a pain to deal with if we needed to patch something for them.

Products that had a shorter release or update cycle (e.g. the mobile app) had a shorter delay (but still a delay) because any issue could be addressed faster.

The services that were hosted by us had the shortest delay on the order of days to weeks.

There were obviously exceptions in both directions but we tried to avoid them.

Prioritisation wasnt really an issue - a lot of dependencies were increased on internal builds so we had more time to test and verify before committing to it once it reached our stability rules.

Other factors that influenced us: - Blast radius - a buggy dependency in our desktop/server applications had more chance to cause damage than our hosted web application so it rolled a little slower for dependencies.

- Language (more like ergonomics of the language) - updating our C++ deps was a lot more cumbersome than JS deps)

esafak

9 hours ago

As long as you can quickly upgrade a package when there's a security patch you're good. You make it sound like that's not the case, though.

slowroll22

8 hours ago

It was definitely possible, as mentioned there were some exceptions (such as cases where we did need to roll out a version with dependencies bumped or with our own critical fixes).

The harder part, as is often the case, wasn't technical - but more convincing customers to take the new version and getting time with their IT teams to manage. It got easier over time but the bureaucracy at some of the clients was slow to change so I suspect they still face some issues.

ozim

14 hours ago

NPM packages follow semantic versioning so minor versions should be fine to auto update. (there is still an issue what for package maintainer might be minor not being minor for you - but let's stick to ideal world for that)

I don't think people are having major versions updated every month, it is more really like 6 months or once a year.

I guess the problem might be people think auto updating minor versions in CI/CD pipeline will keep them more secure as bug fixes should be in minor versions but in reality we see it is not the case and attackers use it to spread malware.

otterley

6 hours ago

> so minor versions should be fine to auto update

The problem is that "should" assumes that point releases never introduce regressions (whether they be security, performance, or correctness). Unfortunately, history has shown that regressions can and do happen. The best practice for release engineering (CI/CD, if you will) is to assume the worst, test thoroughly, and release incrementally (include bake time).

Delaying updates isn't just a backstop against security vulnerabilities; it's useful for letting the dust settle after an update of any kind that can adversely impact the application. The theory is that someone will find it before you, report it, and that a fix will be issued.

ozim

4 hours ago

Regressions are irrelevant in this context, you can accept regressions as something you will deal with in case those happen or not.

Simply installing update automatically you get pwned by bad guys, someone taking over your CI/CD server or infrastructure is not something acceptable.

otterley

3 hours ago

That makes the advice all the more important, rather than making it "irrelevant." My point was that people mistakenly believe point releases are safe to apply automatically. They're not, and not just because of security.

creesch

14 hours ago

> Does the JS ecosystem really move so fast that you can’t wait a month or two before updating your packages?

Really depends on the context and where the code is being used. As others have pointed out most js packages will use semantic versioning. For the patch releases (the last of the three numbers), for code that is exposed to the outside world you generally want to apply those rather quickly. As those will contain hotfixes including those fixing CVEs.

For the major and minor releases it really depends on what sort of dependencies you are using and how stable they are.

The issue isn't really unique to the JavaScript eco system either. A bigger java project (certainly with a lot of spring related dependencies) will also see a lot of movement.

That isn't to say that some tropes about the JavaScript ecosystem being extremely volatile aren't entirely true. But in this case I do think the context is the bigger difference.

> then again, we make client side applications with essentially no networking, so security isn’t as critical for us, stability is much more important)

By its nature, most JavaScript will be network connected in some fashion in environments with plenty of bad actors.

patwolf

12 hours ago

It's common to have npm auditing enabled, which means your CI/CD will force you to update to a brand new version of a package because a security vulnerability was reported in an older one.

I've also had cases where I've found a bug in a package, submitted a bug report or PR, and then immediately pulled in the new version as soon as it was fixed. Things move fast in the JavaScript/npm/GitHub ecosystem.

codemonkey-zeta

12 hours ago

I think the surface area for bugs in a C++ dependency is way bigger than a JS one. Pulling in a new node module is not going to segfault my app, for example.

pandemic_region

14 hours ago

> Does the JS ecosystem really move so fast that you can’t wait a month or two before updating your packages?

In 2 months, a typical js framework goes through the full Gartner Hype Cycle and moves to being unmaintained with an archived git repo and dozens of virus infected forks with similar names.

dwoldrich

3 hours ago

I am an npm user. My reaction to these software supply chain attacks is to stop taking updates unless absolutely necessary for vulnerability mitigation or to selectively take performance or feature upgrades on a package-by-package basis. Obviously, that approach still opens me up to attacks based on when I choose to take updates that coincides with a malicious package release, but I feel like an extreme reluctance to upgrade will mostly keep me safe.

To achieve my goal, would this approach work:

- Pin all of my package.json versions (no prefacing versions with ~ or ^)

- Routine installation of packages both on my local and on CI servers will be done using `npm ci`

- `npm install <package_name> --save-exact/--save-dev` would be used only at the time of adding a package to package.json, followed by an `npm ci`

- Rely on tooling like GitHub Dependabot and CodeQL to inform the team when a dependency should be updated for security reasons and then manually update only the dependency with the desired version using `npm install lodash@4.17.21 --save-exact`, for example

EDIT: Thinking about this more, we would have to forbid deleting the package-lock.json and regenerating it with `npm install` and forbid the use of `npm update` so that package-lock.json would stay stable.

sedatk

3 hours ago

It's all good until the day comes that one dependency breaks compatibility and drops support for the version you have, and now you have days of dependency resolution work ahead of you because you've never bothered for years. Usually, incremental and timely upgrades reduce that kind of friction.

stevepike

3 hours ago

This is very true. It can be a real fire drill if it turns out you need to go up a major version in some other dependency in order to get a security fix. It can get even worse in JS if you're on some abandoned package that's pinned to an old version of some transient dependency which turns out to be vulnerable. Then you're scrambling to migrate to some alternate package with no clear upgrade path.

On the flipside sometimes you get lucky and being on an old version of a package means you don't have the vulnerability in the first place.

libyear is a helpful metric for tracking how much of this debt you might have.

dwoldrich

an hour ago

I have been in the position of having a mix of having to contend with very old (4+ year) transient dependencies brought in by contemporary dependencies where npm and node versions complain about deprecations and associated security issues. I get into icky package.json `overrides` to force these transient dependencies to upgrade.

dwoldrich

3 hours ago

Could that just be the cost of doing business though? I think of it like when a version of Node goes out of support and you have to upgrade a bunch of stuff and fix build scripts. It's always ends up being days of work upgrading dependencies and re-testing everything.

Sammi

2 hours ago

My happy middle ground solution that I've been practicing for years is to update all packages every 2 to 4 months.

null_deref

3 hours ago

In a case of a package breaking compatibility (^) won’t help as well.

keraf

13 hours ago

I might be naive but why isn't any package manager (npm, pnpm, bun, yarn, ...) pushing for a permission system, where packages have to define in the package.json what permission they would like to access? À la Deno but scoped to dependencies or like mobile apps do with their manifest.

I know it would take time for packages to adopt this but it could be implemented as parameters when installing a new dependency, like `npm i ping --allow-net`. I wouldn't give a library like chalk access to I/O, processes or network.

IanCal

13 hours ago

I feel like that would require work from the language side, or at least runtimes. Is there a way of stopping code in one package from, say, hitting the network?

You might be able to do this around install scripts, though disk writing is likely needed for all (but perhaps locations could be controlled).

Filligree

13 hours ago

We've seen a lot of stunningly incompetent attacks that nevertheless get to a lot of people.

Yeah, it needs work from the language runtime, but I think even a hacky, leaky 'security' abstraction would be helpful, because the majority of malware developers probably aren't able to break out of a language-level sandbox, even if the language still allows you to do unsafe array access.

Then we can iterate.

nicoburns

7 hours ago

I feel like the correct solution to these problems (across NPM and all similar package managers) is a web-of-trust audit system based on:

- Reviewing the source code in the actual published package

- Tooling that enable one to easily see a trusted diff between a package version and the previous version of that package

- Built-in support in the package manager CLIs to only install packages that have a sufficient number of manual reviews from trusted sources (+ no / not too many negative reviews). With manual review required to bypass these checks.

There are enough users of each package that such a system should not be too onerous on users once the infrastructure was in place.

Flimm

4 hours ago

How is the age of a package calculated? If the publishing date of a package is obtained from the package's metadata defined by the package author, (just like Git commit dates are defined by the Git committer), then that would defeat the purpose of this new feature. The whole purpose of this feature is to protect from malicious or compromised package authors. Instead, it is necessary to query the package registry, trusting the package registry for the age of the package, rather than the package author. I presume this is how it works.

mnahkies

4 hours ago

Eh we got confused implementing this today.

Basically we severed connection to the public npm registry completely earlier in the week whilst this worm plays out.

Unfortunately there wasn't a way to do this without taking our cached "good" public packages down as well, so we later replicated the good cached packages into a new standalone private registry to be the new upstream.

The bit that was not obvious in the moment but self evident once we realised is that the registry we're using took the copy time as the publish time, and therefore our new 2 week delay is rejecting the copied packages...

So sample size of one, but the registry we're using is definitely using upload time not any metadata in the packages themselves. Good to know the filtering is working.

Ozzie_osman

11 hours ago

Does anyone understand why npm isn't adding these sorts of features?

JoshuaEN

9 hours ago

There was an NPM RFC for this feature (though not as focused on supply chain attacks) in 2022, but the main response mirrored some of the other comments in here.

"waiting a length of time doesn’t increase security, and if such a practice became common then it would just delay discovery of vulnerabilities until after that time anyways"

https://github.com/npm/rfcs/issues/646#issuecomment-12824971...

kardianos

5 hours ago

It seems like the core problem is (1) NPM node_modules is so large usually, no one actually audit them and (2) the NPM churn is so great, no one audits them and (3) the design of NPM appears to think that automatically updating point or minor versions is actually good and desirable.

Go is one of the few packing systems that got these right.

chr15m

11 hours ago

The correct value for this setting is infinity seconds. Upgrades should be considered and deliberate, not automatic.

kibwen

11 hours ago

The downside of this approach is that this is how you create an ecosystem where legitimate security fixes never end up getting applied. There's no free lunch, you need to decide whether you're more concerned about vulnerabilities intentional backdoors (and thus never update anything automatically) or vulnerabilities from ordinary unintentional bugs (and thus have a mechanism for getting security updates automatically).

JoshuaEN

9 hours ago

I don't think this is realistic in the default npm ecosystem where projects can have 1000s of dependencies (with the majority being transitive with fuzzy versions).

Though pnpm does have a setting to help with this too: https://pnpm.io/settings#resolutionmode time-based, which effectively pins subdependencies based on the published time of the direct dependency.

esafak

9 hours ago

No, it isn't. Upgrades should be routine, like exercising. With your approach it becomes increasingly difficult and eventually impossible to upgrade anything since it requires moving a mountain. An update a ̶d̶a̶y̶ week makes the tech debt go away.

tripplyons

9 hours ago

If I run:

pnpm config set -g minimumReleaseAge 1440

Does that work as well? I can't tell if the global settings are the same as workspace settings, and it lets me set nonsense keys this way, so I'm not sure if there is a global equivalent.

sim7c00

4 hours ago

just dont use latest... old oackages can be malicious, benign ones tho... they get malicious generally on 'latest'. not on old versions.

maybe its better to disallow latest than use age as a metric.

h4ch1

12 hours ago

https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/22679

There's an open discussion about adding something similar to bun as well^

minimumReleaseAge doesn't seem to be a bulletproof solution so there's still some research/testing to be done in this area

gausswho

14 hours ago

'Delayed dependency updates' is a response to supply-side attacks in the JavaScript world, but it aptly describes how I have come to approach technology broadly.

Large tech companies, as with most industry, have realized most people will pay with their privacy and data long before they'll pay with money. We live in a time of the Attention Currency, after all.

But you don't need to be a canary to live a technology-enabled life. Much software that you pay with your privacy and data has free or cheap open-source alternatives that approach the same or higher quality. When you orient your way of consuming to 'eh, I can wait till the version that respects me is built', life becomes more enjoyable in myriad ways.

I don't take this to absolute levels. I pay for fancy pants LLM's, currently. But I look forward to the day not too far away where I can get today's quality for libre in my homelab.

tuananh

11 hours ago

in corp settings, you usually have a proxy registry. you can setup firewall there for this kind of things to filter out based on license, cve, release date, etc...

lloydatkinson

8 hours ago

Why must this be in a workspace file which you may not even have if you aren't in a monorepo, why not in package.json? Anyway, it's progress.

bamboozled

12 hours ago

Can anyone tell me if yarn just as vulnerable as NPM? Isn't it the packages that are vulnerable and not the package manger software itself?

cluckindan

7 hours ago

No, the ”vulnerability” here is npm unilaterally allowing postinstall scripts, which are then used as an entry point for malware.

Of course, the malware could just embed itself as an IIFE and get launched when the package is loaded, so disallowing postinstall is not really a security solution.

bamboozled

an hour ago

Interesting, thanks, it contradicts what was said on another similar post.

NamlchakKhandro

10 hours ago

npm is now the tutorial filter.

If I see someone using npm as a cli tool unironically...

user1999919

10 hours ago

but what will we ever do without our: "developers are lazy, developers are dumb, left-pad degeneracy!"

__MatrixMan__

12 hours ago

Its not a bad idea, might help in certain cases.

But the real solution to this kind of attack is to stop resolving packages by name and instead resolve them by hash, then binding a name to that hash for local use.

That would of course be a whole different, mostly unexplored, world, but there's just no getting around the fact that blindly accepting updated versions of something based on its name is always going to create juicy attack surface around the resolution of that name to some bits.

mort96

12 hours ago

The problem here isn't, "someone introduced malware into an existing version of a package". The problem is, "people want to stay up to date, so when a new patch version is released, everyone upgrades to that new patch version".

__MatrixMan__

11 hours ago

The problem is that they implicitly do so. If they had to enter the hash of the latest and greatest version, the onus would be on them at that time to scrutinize it. At worst the spread of the malicious package would be slowed, and at best it would be stopped.

mort96

9 hours ago

Surely you'd achieve the same thing by making people manually enter a new version number?

I'm not inherently against the idea of specifying a hash, it would protect against NPM hosting infrastructure being compromised, but again, that's not what we're seeing here

__MatrixMan__

6 hours ago

If you end up with bits that hash to 0xabc123 and I end up with bits that hash to 0x456def and we both think we installed fooapp version 7.8.9, there's nothing about the version number that tells us which one of us has been hacked.

But if we both attempt to install 0x456def, it's clear that whoever has 0xabc123 is in trouble. This is especially important in cases where you might need a package while you're on a separate network partition than npm. Any peer can provide it and you know it hasn't been tampered with because if it had been it would have a different hash.

mort96

3 hours ago

> If you end up with bits that hash to 0xabc123 and I end up with bits that hash to 0x456def and we both think we installed fooapp version 7.8.9, there's nothing about the version number that tells us which one of us has been hacked.

If this happens, then either the NPM registry has been compromised or my system's 'npm' program or your system's 'npm' program has been compromised.

If the discrepancy is due to one of us running a malicious 'npm', then that malicious 'npm' CLI program could've just not flagged the signature mismatch, so specifying a hash doesn't help us anything.

If both of us are using a non-compromised 'npm' program, and the NPM registry isn't compromised, then we will never be in a situation where my "fooapp version 7.8.9" and your "fooapp version 7.8.9" differs. If a malicious actor compromises an account with publish access for the fooapp package, then all the malicious actor can do is publish a new "fooapp version 7.8.10" that has malware. That's what has happened in every single one of these high profile NPM hacks. You can't retroactively change old versions of your own packages. So to protect against this kind of attack (which, again, means every single NPM hack to date), just not auto-upgrading between minor versions is enough.

To protect against a compromised NPM registry, I agree that we should have package checksums living in our git repositories. But NPM already has that: the package-lock.json contains checksums. I don't understand what it would give us to have that checksum in the package.json instead of the package-lock.json.

mirekrusin

12 hours ago

name + version are immutable, you can't republish packages in npm under existing version.

you can only unpublish.

content hash integrity is verified in lockfiles.

the problem is with dependencies using semver ranges, especially wide ones like "debug": "*"

initiatives like provenance statements [0] / code signing are also good complement to delayed dependency updates.

also not running as default / whitelisting postinstall scripts is good default in pnpm.

modifying (especially adding) keys in npmjs.org should be behind dedicated 2fa (as well as changing 2fa)

[0] https://docs.npmjs.com/generating-provenance-statements

__MatrixMan__

11 hours ago

Those are promises that npm intends to keep, but whether they do or not isn't something that you as a package user can verify. Plus there's also the possibility that the server you got those bits from was merely masquerading as npm.

The only immutability that counts is immutability that you can verify, which brings us back to cryptographic hashes.

frankdejonge

12 hours ago

Resolving by hash is a half solution at best. Not having automated dependency upgrades also has severe security downsides. Apart from that, lock files basically already do what you describe, they contain the hashes and the resolution is based off the name while the hash ensures for the integrity of the resolved package. The problem is upgrade automation and supply chain scanning. The biggest issue there is that scanning is not done where the vulnerability is introduced because there is no money for it.

__MatrixMan__

11 hours ago

Do you suppose that automated dependency upgrades are less likely to introduce malicious code than to remove it? They're about compliance, not security. If I can get you to use malicious code in the first place I can also trick you into upgrading from safe code to the vulnerable code in the name of "security".

As for lock files, they prevent skulduggery after the maintainer has said "yeah, I trust this thing and my users should too" but the attacks we're seeing is upstream of that point because maintainers are auto-trusting things based on their name+version pair, not based on their contents.

debazel

10 hours ago

> If I can get you to use malicious code in the first place I can also trick you into upgrading from safe code to the vulnerable code in the name of "security".

Isn't the whole point that malicious actors usually only have a very short window where they can actually get you to install anything, before shut out again? That's the whole point of having a delay in the package-manager.

__MatrixMan__

10 hours ago

Who is going to discover it in that time? Not the maintainers, they've already released it. Their window for scrutiny has passed.

There is some sense in giving the early adopters some time to raise the alarm and opting into late adoption, but isn't that better handled by defensive use of semantic versioning?

Consider the xzutils backdoor. It was introduced a month before it was discovered, and it was discovered by a user.

If that user had waited a few days, it would just have been discovered a few days later, during which time it may have been added to an even wider scope of downstream packages. That is, supposing they didn't apply reduced scrutiny due to their perception that it was safe due to the soak period.

Its not nothing, but its susceptible to creating a false sense of security.

debazel

9 hours ago

The maintainers did notice in both of the recent attacks, but it takes time to regain access to your compromised account to take the package down, contact npm, etc.

All recent attacks have also been noticed within hours of release by security companies that automatically scan all newly released packages published to npm.

So as far as I know all recent attacks would have been avoided by adding a short delay.

chuckadams

6 hours ago

The xz backdoor went undetected so long partly because the build scripts were already so hairy and baroque that no one noticed the extra obfuscations that ran code out of a binary blob in test data. None of which was even in the source repo, it was dropped into the package build scripts externally just before pushing them to the apt/rpm package repositories.

progx

15 hours ago

That solve not really the problem.

A better (not perfect) solution: Every package should by AI analysed on an update before it is public available, to detect dangerous code and set a rating.

In package.json should be a rating defined, when remote package is below that value it could be updated, if it is higher a warning should appear.

But this will cost, but i hope, that companies like github, etc. will allow package-Repositories to use their services for free. Or we should find a way, to distribute this services to us (the users and devs) like a BOINC-Client.

jonkoops

15 hours ago

Ah, yes! The universal and uncheatable LLM! Surely nothing can go wrong.

NitpickLawyer

14 hours ago

Perfect is the enemy of good. Current LLM systems + "traditional tools" for scanning can get you pretty far into detecting the low hanging fruit. Hell, I bet even a semantic search with small embedding models could give you a good insight into "what's in the release notes matches what's in the code". Simply flag it for being delayed a few hours, till a human can view it. Or run additional checks.

progx

15 hours ago

I can't wait to read about your solution.

orphea

13 hours ago

You don't need to be a chef to tell that the soup is too salty.

progx

15 hours ago

As i wrote "not perfect". But better than anything else or nothing.

robertlagrant

14 hours ago

The Politician's Syllogism[0] is instructive.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician's_syllogism

progx

14 hours ago

OK, we are here now on reddit or facebook?

I thought we discuss here problems and possible solutions.

My fault.

rpdillon

9 hours ago

I'm not sure why everyone is so hostile. Your idea has merit, along the lines of a heuristic that you trigger a human review as a follow-up. I'd be surprised if this isn't exactly the direction things go, although I don't think the tools will be given for free, but rather made part of the platform itself, or perhaps as an add-on service.

robertlagrant

13 hours ago

I don't think "we should use AI to solve this" is a solution proposal.

philipwhiuk

9 hours ago

A better solution is restricting package permissions.