At this point, any package adding a pre-install hook where there previously was not one should be denied and treated with extreme suspicion.
It's time pre-install / post-install hooks were killed off. Start with a moratorium on any new ones.
At this point, any package adding a pre-install hook where there previously was not one should be denied and treated with extreme suspicion.
It's time pre-install / post-install hooks were killed off. Start with a moratorium on any new ones.
yeah but they can just put the dropper, etc in index.js, so that it runs at import time rather than at install time, no? i guess first-install time is often a privileged developer machine, and will execute in a "server"-like runtime such as Node, Bun, Deno. but blocking preinstall scripts is basic first aid...
Nobody is claiming this is a complete solution to security. I would call this "necessary but not sufficient". You won't get far as an engineer if you refuse to implement "necessary but not sufficient" changes because the change doesn't in and of itself one-shot the entire problem.
These half-measures is why everything has gone to shits. Instead of properly auditing software, reducing the quantity and increasing the quality, we keep pushing more and more garbage where all you find is 2FA that, captcha this, not supported this, app not signed, etc..
Can't agree more. I'm working on OSS security tool that can protect you from Shai-hulud, no half measures.
The idea is to have a local proxy that injects real secrets into requests in-flight, so a compromised library has nothing to steal because it never had access to any of your secrets: https://github.com/inflightsec/agent-vault-proxy
Defense in depth is the “meat and potatoes” of security.
In other words: people should be auditing their software, but we should also design systems and schemes that provide varying degrees of defense and protection when people invariably fail to review the code they run.
Defence in depth is not just 'throw anything in that might improve security' though. The idea is to have multiple strong layers, not a hundred half-measures that are all easily bypassed. A stronger layer might be sandboxing, or separating your build and publishing steps as others have suggested (and also probably worth restricting the credentials the publishing step to just the relevant packages as well). These will at least robustly prevent a malicious dependency from spreading horizontally, but you'll still potentially ship malware to your customers.
I would consider 2FA and signing to be strong layers, when applied well. I think everybody agrees we shouldn’t add layers just for the sake of it.
The fact that it's not sufficient also largely means it's not necessary either, because the real solution is auditing and trusting the codebase as a whole. All you do when disabling install hooks is make a lot of situations much more difficult to handle.
You will also not get very far in engineering if you have a production incident, someone proposes a thing that will mitigate it partially but significantly, and you insist that we can't deploy that mitigation because we need to do the multi-year project that will actually fix it instead. Even if we still need that project, we also need that mitigation.
Sure, solve the problem of "auditing and trusting codebases". Go for it. Shouldn't take you until, oh, let me be generous and give you until next Monday. No sweat.
Feel free to turn it off yourself, just don't be surprised when the attackers switch tactics. And don't make life harder for everyone else by pushing it as mandatory.
(if you want a better mitigation: don't automatically update dependencies in CI. At a minimum have a cooling-off period that you only bypass on manual review. This is not hard to implement and at least gives some time for alarm bells to be sounded before you're pwned. Probably while doing the updates you can also just do a quick sanity check on the changes, that'll also catch the ones using a blatant install hook)
> if you want a better mitigation: don't automatically update dependencies in CI. At a minimum have a cooling-off period that you only bypass on manual review. This is not hard to implement and at least gives some time for alarm bells to be sounded before you're pwned.
One of the problems a lot of companies are having right now is trying to determine a proper window size between CVE release and patching.
On one hand, you have LLM created 0days and attacks are happening almost as fast as CVEs can be posted, and CVEs are being posted at lightning speed. You maybe had a month or a few weeks to patch before, now the window may be down to days or even hours.
On the other hand, you want to prevent these repo bombing attacks.
There's a tension there but I think we're going to end up measuring that window in hours within the year, if we're not already there.
If you need quick responses to such things, you're gonna need some intelligence in the loop regardless, even if it's just deciding when it's worth pushing a new release to prod.
What if it needs to get patched and pushed while you and everyone else in the org are asleep?
I mean that's a big window of time now.
Always has been, arguably. Either way I don't think most people have their CI configured to automatically re-run when a dependency updates (imagine the thundering herd!), the compromises are more incidental to runs happening for other reasons, and that configuration neither guarantees a quick response nor protects against supply chain attacks.
(If you find you do need updates when you're sleeping, you probably need to delegate that process or at least the process of checking the update to someone you trust, and you're probably paying for the service. This blog post is in large part an ad for just such a service).
> You will also not get very far in engineering if
Man, I wish.
Missile defense systems are unnecessary because they could just use tanks
Anti-tank measures are unnecessary because they can just use missiles
What's your solution to using a library without executing the code in it?
The term you are looking for is Defense in Depth/Layers
That makes sense if it's actually a layer. You can create a thousand minor obstacles and it still won't be a very secure system.
"make no mistakes" is not the "real solution"
Neither is 'close the gate with no fence on either side of it'. If you want to run code, you either need to run it in a sandbox or trust it. Choosing to run only part of the code is not really a solution.
(if you want to disable such hooks yourself, then you may get some security by diversity because you're not using the common configuration. But if it becomes the default then these worms will switch to a different vector)
Prod tends to have less privileges than CI/CD. CI/CD tends to be full admin, so it's far more sensitive. Prod tends to have tooling for detecting breaches, better logging, etc. People tend to use containers, which act as a sandbox.
Prod also won't be wormable the way that CI/CD is. With CI/CD I can own another dev, use their creds to push another malicious build script, etc. "Attacker is in my prod env" isn't wormable.
Yes, capabilities in prod would be hugely beneficial but removing CI/CD is massive as a win.
Wouldn't the dropper get executed once tests are run within CI though?
Yes, you should separate "tests execute" into their own unprivileged workflows that don't have "deploy" secrets.
You can also do the same for the build workflow, no?
Yep, I'd recommend it.
yeah, or when a dev starts the local development server (unless that server is containerized).
Dev laptops tend to have better monitoring than CI/CD so I still think this is a better option. You can also have devs use VMs or separate dev environments like an ec2 instance.
To be clear, just solving the CI/CD portion is insufficient, but it is a massive win.
well Deno has the necessary ingredients for defense: file-system permission by path
iirc does pnpm not allow them by default. But even if we killed them off there would still be a chance of the malware hooking into something else or only working in cli applications.
The latest version of all node package managers (npm, yarn, pnpm) now deny this by default. pnpm was ahead of the curve.
npm v12 released last month also defaults into blocking them by default
You'll just end up with people running `./configure` scripts or whatever instead. The solution I've currently landed on is:
1. Audit build scripts/ proc macros for rust code (and mark with cargo-vet).
2. Have an isolated workflow for "build/test/push artifact to temporary place" (s3, github artifact, whatever). No API keys in this workflow.
3. Have another workflow that has the API keys to publish that grabs the artifact and then places it into a registry.
This creates clear separation of "code runs here" and "environment has privileges".
In my own slop-driven programming language I have build scripts declare their capabilities upfront so that you can statically reason about them (same with runtime permissions).