Programming

26994 readers

187 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

snowe@programming.dev

Ategon@programming.dev

UlrikHD@programming.dev

bugsmith@programming.dev

Spyro@programming.dev

143

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Package Manager Where This Regularly Happens (kevinpatel.xyz)

submitted 3 days ago by HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org to c/programming@programming.dev

44 comments fedilink hide all child comments

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - In the wake of a devastating supply chain attack in the npm registry that left millions of enterprise applications compromised and billions of user records exposed, developers across the JavaScript ecosystem expressed deep sorrow today, lamenting that such a crisis was completely unavoidable.

“It’s a shame, but what can you do? This is just the price of building modern web apps,” said Senior Frontend Engineer Mark Vance, echoing the sentiments of a community that completely relies on a 40-level-deep nested tree of unvetted packages maintained by pseudonymous strangers to capitalize a single string. “There’s absolutely no way to foresee or prevent someone from taking over a long-abandoned utility package and injecting a crypto-miner into every production build in the world. It’s just an act of nature.”

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Piatro@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago (3 children)

One of these days I should really look at the specific differences that means Linux packages rarely experience this while npm it happens seemingly once a month.

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago

One of the biggest difference is package signing, which is often multi party where multiple developers review changes and coordinate uploads.

There are others, like how Debian and Red Hat essentially maintain forks of software which they only apply cherry picked security updates to. This blocked the XZ utils backdoor, for example. Debian Unstable, Arch, and other distros which shipped newer versions of software got the backdoor. But not Debian Stable and Red Hat.

I wrote a long post here, in which I go more in depth: https://programming.dev/post/48171483/23081855

[–] iglou@programming.dev 4 points 2 days ago

Typically people only have trustworthy repositories configured. The amount of people with access to deploy on those is low. Less keys, less chance of someone stealing one.

Plus, let's be honest, people deploying linux packages are probably much more security-conscious than people deploying a random but useful javascript lib on npm.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 days ago

Chain of trust for one.