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.
The chalk+debug+error-ex maintainer probably would have noticed a few hours later when they got home and saw a bunch of "Successfully published" emails from npm that they didn't trigger.
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?
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.
'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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 57.2 ms ] threadDoes the JS ecosystem really move so fast that you can’t wait a month or two before updating your packages?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
If I see someone using npm as a cli tool unironically...
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.
- 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.
Go is one of the few packing systems that got these right.