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Comment by trimethylpurine | Hacker News Reader

I don't see what the fuss is about. This all looks pretty standard. I use random people's stuff all the time. Isn't that the point of open source?

Did you find something malicious in the random GitHub repo? If so, you should write an article about that instead.

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Using somebody's stuff is different than hot-linking directly to a hosted version of it, even just from the perspective that dude could delete it at any time and break the whole app.

That's fair. I download and embed, personally. Still, it's not a rant worthy mistake, honestly. Suggest a better approach, sure.

It's definitely a rant worthy mistake because this would literally never happen in any professional app anywhere. This is a supply chain risk.

Microsoft? Okta? JetBrains? If these are amateurs, who is a professional developer?

https://www.encryptionconsulting.com/top-10-supply-chain-att...

Are you aware that common libraries like Bootstrap, FontAwesome, and HTMX walk developers through linking to their CDNs directly? In fact, FontAwesome recommends it for CDN performance.

I think you're dangerously mistaken if you believe that it "literally never" happens. It literally does happen all the damned time. And, for your own safety and others', you should assume that when you use any app for which you don't have the source code.

Linking to a CDN is for development only. Once the app is build you build your dependencies into the app. You don't fetch them at runtime and run them. Not only for security, but also for performance.

There's also a difference between using a CDN for, say, React and a random github project hosted by some dude.

Yeah I agree. Tell Microsoft. But, meanwhile this is normally used wrong in a lot of apps. It's not newsworthy that this one is also.

I don't know if you're being serious or not, but in case you are: There is a difference between (re)using other people's open sourced code, hopefully reviewed, and giving anyone in control of the third party repository the ability to run arbitrary code on your user's devices. Even if the "random GitHub repo" doesn't contain any malicious code right now, it may well contain some tomorrow.

Completely agree. This is really unique. Can you imagine if it were standard practice to be open to supply chain attacks like that, by blindly relying on hotlinked or unpinned dependencies?

Why imagine? Let's take a quick look at what's actually happening right now. We can check some widely used libraries and see what their instructions are teaching new developers.

Boostrap (code snippet from their quick start instructions): ``` <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> <title>Bootstrap demo</title> <link href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.3.8/dist/css/bootst..." rel="stylesheet" integrity="sha384-sRIl4kxILFvY47J16cr9ZwB07vP4J8+LH7qKQnuqkuIAvNWLzeN8tE5YBujZqJLB" crossorigin="anonymous"> </head>

Pay close attention, they are inviting the new developer to link not just to Bootstrap, but to Popper!

HTMX (code snippet from their quick start guide): ``` <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/htmx.org@2.0.8/dist/htmx.min.js"></script>  <button hx-post="/clicked" hx-swap="outerHTML"> Click Me </button> ```

Fontawesome: A video quick start guide and instructions that recommends using the direct link to the kits via CDN for performance!

Look, I certainly don't think they should be used this way. But, to say that it's unique to the White House app? I definitely wouldn't say that. In fact, I think you've dangerously overestimated the status quo.

They have not. CDNs are specifically meant for demo/non-critical usage, to make it easy for amateurs to try out the library.

You don't do this in any non-trivial system.

According to FontAwesome you're wrong. Their instructions say that their CDN is the recommended way to use their kits.

So, it's nice that you don't do this. But there's nothing special about the White House app doing it. It's very common.

I was being sarcastic. Although hot linking is not particularly common, it's common enough; and unpinned dependencies are just as much if not more of a supply chain attack risk.

I'd bet something like 70+% of all JS apps are inadequately protected against the risk of a malicious actor gaining access to a dependency's repo.

Pearlclutching over this while ignoring the lessons of `left-pad` and `colors` is biased motivated reasoning at best.

Awesome. Now that I know you were being sarcastic it's hilarious. It's amazing how difficult it is to tell from text.

Huh? But there are integrity checks (none in htmx case, which is strange), to prevent exactly this attack.

I'm not sure I follow. How does an integrity check help when the source is compromised? The developer doesn't know that their repo is compromised. They continue posting legitimate hashes because the repo is legitimately compromised.

even open source is not that trustworthy.

there are several corpo open source ai apps that have rce built in.

to cut a long story short they pull their config from the developer's server on startup. that config has user level permissions giving rce.

some have no rce but get remote executed exfiltration of all the prompts. the app pulls its posthog config on startup and can just take all the keyboard inputs.

submit a disclosure and they do nothing or accuse of 'ai slop reports' despite being vibe coded themselves

It's always a better idea to make a local copy of it.

Imagine they're downloading a project directly from your GitHub account. Even if you're not doing anything malicious and have no intention of doing anything malicious even after you've been aware of this, now all of a sudden your GitHub account / email is a huge target for anyone that wants to do something malicious.

All good for you to make those choices for yourself. Your response seems to be show ignorance of all the recent supply chain attacks that have occurred. You can imagine that given the situation with the shoe gifts that many high up members of the administration and cabinet members are running this app.

I'm critical of the author.

I'm well aware of supply chain attacks. But this isn't a supply chain attack. If it were, the article would be way more interesting.

The supply chain attack articles are interesting exactly because this is so common. So what's special here other than it being loosely related to a disliked political figure? HN isn't supposed to be an especially political website.

"A common app is doing the same thing that basically every other app is doing."

Is that a good headline? No. And this isn't a good article.

> I'm well aware of supply chain attacks. But this isn't a supply chain attack. If it were, the article would be way more interesting.

It's an article that includes coverage of the exposure to supply chain attacks, mainly via directly linking in https://lonelycpp.github.io/react-native-youtube-iframe/ifra.... You seem to be flippantly dismissing this as insignificant given the people who are probably running this app.

> HN isn't supposed to be an especially political website.

Yes but when technology and politics cross paths...

There's nothing you could exploit here. There's nothing special about this app. This article is about nothing. Not politics and not technology.

If you enjoy reading about how a guy smelled another guy's underpants and discovered that they smell like everyone else's, then rest assured, you can continue reading it over and over again if you like. I'm not able to down vote, so your enjoyment is safe from my opinion.

If he finds something interesting in there (I hope he does), and writes another article I might miss it, unfortunately, because I've written him off as a trash piece author.

EDIT: I went to use this as an example. Hilarious, this blog now has a bad SSL cert, just to put the icing on the cake.

For an Android game downloaded from the Play store I wouldn't find these findings surprising at all. But from an official app from the White House? Well ok, from THIS White House - you're completely right to expect that.

Lol, this is a really funny take. I'm imagining Joe Biden or George Bush asking, "did you check it for supply chain vulnerabilities?"

The DoD has been hacked countless times, by children even. I wouldn't doubt if we decompiled most government apps we'd find this same vector in many of them.

It seems like this vector is only recently a hot topic. And decades of doing things wrong won't be patched and habits broken in short time. It will take a few years to get the majority of it, and decades after that to get the next majority, and so on.

I agree that governments in general are very bad at this. But I also think that this admistration is even more special in it's own way.

Okay, great! So post a piece that criticizes Trump.

This one failed to do that. And that makes it stink of fanaticism (which is annoying to rational folks).

Come on, you're defending a sinking ship ;). Trump might be right about a lot of things, but that doesn't make him right about everything. And he and his whole administration pretends he is. And it's just pathetic and laughable how they try to keep denying how their decisions where maybe not always the wisest or most responsible. I think that is just very unprofessional, and just plainly simply childish. And I think it's becoming more and more clear that that is actually the way it is. The worse it gets the more they go in denial and the more they blame the woke democrats for everything that's their failures. They just don't know what responsibility is and only know how to turn around the narrative to blame others and to make it seem like they're the best ever. You just can't make this stuff up. But I'm actually enjoying it, because they're falling now and they're gonna fall hard. Interesting times.

I'm not defending anything. I was criticizing an author.

Your commentary, just as well, might be interesting here if you were a chat bot.

This is HN, not CNN.

So what's your point? Because previous administrations also make mistakes, we should accept all the crap coming from the current administration? That seems to be the only defense of the Trump fans these days.

Again, I agree that pervious admins were also crap, but that isn't an excuse for the current administration. We should be critical and sceptical regardless. And I think this current admin is actually worse, even so they tried so hard (or at least pretents) to fix everything. But it's all the same, left of right, they're all fooling us, and have us fighting among each other, so we don't see what's really happening behind the stage.

And you're comparing the DoD being hacked with the White House releasing a spy-app.

That is comparing incompetence with abuse.

It's both bad but different kinds of bad. One is ignorant, the other is evil.

It's not a spy app. Lol! Do you code?

Companies that sell app development don't write an app from scratch for every one of their customers. They have a template that includes basic functions that are relevant for marketing. May not be needed for everyone, but why would they bother removing it without pay? That's what you're looking at here.

It's vanilla nothing, sprinkled with your political heroes, stirred and served to you on HN.

Enjoy bro. If you liked the article, read it again. It's even more Trump related the second time!

The dependencies weren't vendored, meaning their behavior can change at any time if a malicious actor gains control of that third-party repo.

This is bad for security.

Yes, I agree. And it's sadly, as we can see, still fairly standard practice to ignore it.

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