| ▲ | dmix 2 hours ago |
| Our company uses yarn 4 which has an option to prevent you from installing an npm package for the first number of days of its release. Most of these seem to be caught within that timeframe (1-3 days). https://gist.github.com/mcollina/b294a6c39ee700d24073c0e5a4e... |
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| ▲ | 0xbadcafebee 40 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| The package event-stream was compromised and went unnoticed for 60 days: https://medium.com/intrinsic-blog/compromised-npm-package-ev... The package axios was compromised, and hijacked the author's credentials, so every attempt at a fix was unfixed. https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/26/c/axios-npm-pac... The xz utility was backdoored for 2 months: https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20240403-timeline-of-xz-ope... A student researcher took over Python ctx and PHPass package maintainership, pushing out malicious changes, and that took over 7 days to be detected and fixed: https://infosecwriteups.com/how-i-hacked-ctx-and-phpass-modu... Kaspersky found multiple PyPI packages that had been exploited for more than a year: https://www.kaspersky.com/about/press-releases/kaspersky-unc... "LoftyLife" packages were exploited for several months: https://securelist.com/lofylife-malicious-npm-packages/10701... Now that the attack window has changed to 7 days, all new exploits like these will come with time bombs to not trigger until 8 days. |
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| ▲ | Sayrus 20 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > Now that the attack window has changed to 7 days, all new exploits like these will come with time bombs to not trigger until 8 days. Many automated scanners use static code analysis rather than run the installation script. Not all of them are caught, but a good part of them are and you'd be saved by a delay. |
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| ▲ | mihaelm an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| `pnpm` also has that and it's on by default since `v11`: https://pnpm.io/settings#minimumreleaseage |
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| ▲ | wg0 32 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If everybody starts to delay for 3 days, wouldn't it be the case that everyone would discover it on the 3rd day? |
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| ▲ | cortesoft 31 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Vulnerability scanners and security researchers would be looking those first 3 days |
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| ▲ | iwhalen 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| uv supports the same for any Python developers out there: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/concepts/resolution/#dependency-co... |
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| ▲ | darth_avocado 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There is something to be said about the need to keep all the packages as the latest and the greatest at all times. Every minor version update doesn’t need to be immediately applied. And maybe high and critical vulnerabilities don’t need to be a minor version upgrade. |
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| ▲ | Waterluvian 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I’m having a real problem at work with security theatre and the growing push to obsess over numbers of “vulnerabilities” in our projects. And then auto Dependabot PRs that encourage churn to fix issues that if an informed person actually reviews easily concludes it doesn’t affect us in the slightest. | |
| ▲ | chrisweekly 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | "maybe high and critical vulnerabilities don’t need to be a minor version upgrade" huh? what do you suggest instead? | | |
| ▲ | darth_avocado 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | A separate pathway to updates. At the moment there is a pressure to keep all the packages updated at all times. Every time a new version of a random package deep in the dependency tree gets published, you roll a dice: is it a bunch of bug fixes that I don’t care about or a vulnerability patch that need to apply immediately? Since it could be either most devs just auto pilot on updates. This creates an environment where newly introduced vulnerabilities get promoted rather quickly before the version matures. Sure, waiting a few days to update a package sounds great, but there is no guarantee that the vulnerability will be found quickly. To give you a context, I get 20-30 PRs a week across all my repos with potentially hundreds of packages (non distinct) from dependabot. I give it a cursory look and try to get a summary of changes. Do I evaluate every single package update? Nope. |
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| ▲ | kylebebak an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| npm supports this now as well, with e.g. `min-release-age=7` in `.npmrc` |
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| ▲ | phoronixrly 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What happens when everyone adopts this policy? You just change it to two weeks? |
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| ▲ | blm126 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The one week cooldown option is not relying on other users to be a canary for you. Its just giving automated scanners a chance to notice. This is the perfect example. I don't think step security found this by accident. They are actively monitoring NPM package releases at some level. There is something to be said that Microsoft should be scanning packages pre-release. They aren't, though, so for right now there is a ton of value with very little downside if people implement a one week cooldown period. To answer your question directly, though. If everyone else moves to a one week cooldown, I would absolutely suggest a two week cooldown is a good idea. Being the "slow" moving organization is a good security trade-off so long as you don't take it to extremes and have escape hatches when you actually need to be moving quickly. | | |
| ▲ | phoronixrly 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Thank you for the thorough response. I got the following from yours and other responses: * The JS ecosystem has been and will most likely continue to be fast-moving, so it's quite a safe assumption that at no point will a quarantine period be wide-spread. * This quarantine period is for (semi-)automated scanners to catch the issue. Although considering the above there will always be a non-zero amount of end-user canaries as well. * Maybe NPM should run scanners before distributing malware? * If the ecosystem by any chance adopts a week-long quarantine period, you'd be safer if you applied a longer quarantine period. | | |
| ▲ | _flux an hour ago | parent [-] | | > Maybe NPM should run scanners before distributing malware? I suspect there's always a human checking these results. If NPM straight out rejects an update due to suspected malware, they might end up rejecting correct updates as well. If they grant some "safe" patterns a special pass, they might get exploited. So I think this only works if you have security scanners that are well-maintained and kept in secret. NPM folks could of course co-operate with some security companies to have a first stab with the releases before they are put to public access. At some point some parties might start want to have monetary compensation for such an arragnement, though. | | |
| ▲ | phoronixrly 30 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Look, nobody requested fully automated scanners that are never wrong. A scanner that asks the project owner to sign in with 2fa and confirm the release in case it's been flagged is going to be more than sufficient. |
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| ▲ | JoshTriplett 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A large array of automated and semi-automated security scanners are finding things quickly. The main benefit of waiting before updating is to give those scanners time to work. | | |
| ▲ | genxy an hour ago | parent [-] | | Would be nice if cargo had a cooldown flag and could respect lockfiles by default. |
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| ▲ | Ukv 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Security scans and authors realizing an unauthorized version was pushed will generally happen regardless of whether regular users updated. Even for compromises that are found by users updating, it'd generally be better to reduce the number of people affected with a slow roll-out rather than everyone jumping on at once. | |
| ▲ | Tomte 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You rely on the security companies scanning the packages. | | |
| ▲ | exitb 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Well, if that actually works, it should be part of the release process, before the packages get placed onto the regular channels. | | |
| ▲ | blm126 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think the key right now is that these are semi-automated scanning processes. Right now, companies like step security selectively publish. So, in order for a hacking group to find out if their malware is detected or not, they have to burn access to a useful package. None of this is to say I think Microsoft shouldn't be doing something as part of the release process on NPM. However, there is real value in giving more independent third parties a window to do things semi-manually. |
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| ▲ | ZiiS 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | @exitb it is much more desirable for security scanning companies to compete to find issues in a timely manor. If npm blessed one as a gatekeeper to the whole system they would be between a rock and a hard place. Unable to priorities high impact packages over the long tail of packages no one uses without pissing people off. Unable to add experimental new detections that may be a little noisy at first due to the huge disruption it would cause. Be trivial to game as obscure packages could brute-force their way though then use the same hole on a mainstream package. | |
| ▲ | sandos 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Then the ... malware will just add delays? Or do they really do manual in-depth analysis of all new code? Just running and seeing it do things is probably a lot easier. | | |
| ▲ | Ukv an hour ago | parent [-] | | Security scanners won't be "manual in-depth analysis of all new code" or "Just running and seeing it do things", but somewhere in-between - utilizing static analysis/machine learning. It's a cat-and-mouse game, but the library adding code that waits X days to run something obfuscated would be another pattern that they could look for. I think attackers are unlikely to add a delay in the first place because the chance of their attack being found out before it activates would be too high. They seem to generally work on the assumption that they have a day or so before the package is yanked (e.g: from maintainer noticing their account is compromised) so need to move fast. |
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| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | BoredPositron 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Always one day more than people on HN tell you. If something is compromised you will hear people complaining here that three days is not enough. | |
| ▲ | bakugo 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This will never happen unless it's made the default. Most people will always stick with the defaults. |
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| ▲ | olejorgenb an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| pnpm also support this |
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| ▲ | dmix an hour ago | parent [-] | | The gist link above covers how to use it in yarn, npm, and pnpm |
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