I don’t know much about NPM (having avoided JS as much as possible for my entire life), but golang seems to have a good solution: ‘vendoring’. One can choose to lock all external dependencies to local snapshots brought into a project, with no automatic updating, but with the option to manually update them when desired.
I don’t think that that’s a counter to the specific attack described in the article:
The malicious packages have names that are similar to legitimate ones for the Puppeteer and Bignum.js code libraries and for various libraries for working with cryptocurrency.
That’d be a counter if you have some known-good version of a package and are worried about updates containing malicious software.
But in the described attack, they’re not trying to push malicious software into legitimate packages. They’re hoping that a dev will accidentally use the wrong package (which presumably is malicious from the get-go).
Ah, good. I wonder why it isn’t used more often – this wouldn’t be such a huge problem then I would hope. (Let me guess – ‘convenience’, the archenemy of security.)
I don’t know much about NPM (having avoided JS as much as possible for my entire life), but golang seems to have a good solution: ‘vendoring’. One can choose to lock all external dependencies to local snapshots brought into a project, with no automatic updating, but with the option to manually update them when desired.
I don’t think that that’s a counter to the specific attack described in the article:
That’d be a counter if you have some known-good version of a package and are worried about updates containing malicious software.
But in the described attack, they’re not trying to push malicious software into legitimate packages. They’re hoping that a dev will accidentally use the wrong package (which presumably is malicious from the get-go).
NPM has that as well. In fact most languages and build tools support that. It’s actually rare to not have support for that these days.
Ah, good. I wonder why it isn’t used more often – this wouldn’t be such a huge problem then I would hope. (Let me guess – ‘convenience’, the archenemy of security.)