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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Not really, app sec companies scan npm constantly for updated packages to check for malware. Many attacks get caught that way.
e.g. the debug + chalk supply chain attack was caught like this: https://www.aikido.dev/blog/npm-debug-and-chalk-packages-com...
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:
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
'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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
Do you suppose that automated dependency upgrades are less likely to introduce malicious code than to remove it? They're about compliance, not security. I can just as easily trick you into upgrading to the vulnerable code than upgrading away from it.
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.
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.
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.
https://pnpm.io/settings#modulescachemaxage
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.
/s
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.
> 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.
[1] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/05/03/prioritizing-sec...
2) Real chances for owners to notice they have been compromised
3) Adopt early before that commons is fully tragedy-ed.
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.
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.
Does the JS ecosystem really move so fast that you can’t wait a month or two before updating your packages?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You might be able to do this around install scripts, though disk writing is likely needed for all (but perhaps locations could be controlled).
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.
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
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.
Good to see some OSS alternatives showing up!
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.
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
The only immutability that counts is immutability that you can verify, which brings us back to cryptographic hashes.
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.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician's_syllogism
I thought we discuss here problems and possible solutions.
My fault.