Building my npx business card

ashley.dev

8 points·edent··11 comments

Do these npx business cards run arbitrary code on your computer?

npx

Run a command from a local or remote npm package

Description

This command allows you to run an arbitrary command from an npm package (either one installed locally, or fetched remotely), in a similar context as running it via npm run.

Yes, then is a "command from an npm package" arbitrary code?

And what is this "similar context as running it via npm run"?

Would it be better to answer the question directly?

Yeah, this seems like a very smart but inherently flawed idea.

Yes I agree! OSS package management ecosystems are a great idea, but allowing submissions without any review or vetting is just asking for supply chain attacks.

May as well just release an executable tbh.

Terminal business cards are a nice idea, but RCE business cards are just asking for trouble. Instead of npx, what happened to good'ol curl? Something like

$ curl ashley.dev

Some decades ago, we had finger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_%28protocol%29) which is designed for this very use case. Sadly it's no longer installed by default with most distros:

$ finger @ashley.dev

Reminds me of JAPH [0] - a tiny Perl program that was used in email/newsgroup signature to give it personal touch.

[0] https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=412464

This would be a great advertisement for security consulting.

"I was just able to run arbitrary code on your computer. Here is a sample of your recent browser history. Let me tell you help you mitigate your security vulnerabilities."

Ooh, free real estate, let's colonize and gentrify package management

Lmao, gentrify cracked me up

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