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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised this hasn't caused the software industry to completely halt and rewrite/audit all third party libraries and dependencies. The entire software supply chain is highly trust-based, npm especially. Why aren't we seeing the start of a NIH dark age?

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NPM is not trusted by major fortune enterprises. Many of the tech companies I've worked at banned using NPM in prod. And instead created their own NPM Clone with source code pinned into a private repo, which security audited.

Adding a single NPM library became a total PITA, as it linked to another 100 other NPM libraries, which in-tern linked to an additional 100+ other NPM libraries. So adding a single NPM library to the private repo, meant adding 100s to 1000s of other NPM libraries. (E.g. left-pad [1])

Personally, I think this was a major reason for node.js not picking up more in the enterprise space. With Python & golang getting more traction.

[1] https://qz.com/646467/how-one-programmer-broke-the-internet-...

> With Python & golang getting more traction.

Does pip not have the same issues?

Python and go have similar issues though. People do not audit and do no vendor their dependencies.

At least python and go packages don't execute arbitrary code on developer's workstations at install time. If you pin dependencies to a known safe version, then you're relatively safe.

With NPM, just typing `npm update` can pwn your workstation.

For Python this is only true for wheels packages. Source packages may execute arbitrary code in setup.py during pip install (compiling C code for example).

What is the fundamental difference between pip and npm here? `pip install` will run whatever is in the `setup.py` of the package (and recursively do the same with any dependencies). That is essentially arbitrary code execution, no?

This feels more like a numbers issue than a fundamental difference, i.e. Python packages generally have orders of magnitude fewer dependencies than JS ones because the standard library is very extensive. Most dependencies are major libraries rather than small ones, which are much less likely to be compromised.

I wonder how many enterprises can afford that? I know of one that had a security team that was supposed to approve all dependencies, but it became a joke because it took them forever to approve a package or update, so patches weren't approved in a timely manner. The security workload had the reverse effect of making many builds less secure.

There does seem to be a market opportunity though, for a curated, "blessed" clone of NPM for enterprises to pull from.

I feel that the information about the breach didn’t reach a mainstream audience, because of the other things happening (such as the US election and all the chaos generated). In the current climate it’s difficult to pass the message that a massive cyber attack happened and have people take you seriously.

I could see that. Did it have a "cute" name? I think heartbleed and shellshock had more airtime but were less damaging IMO.

How many trillions of dollars do you think that would cost? Where's that money going to come from?

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