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Comment by fortuitous-frog | Hacker News Reader

Did you investigate the maintainer compromise and publication path? The malicious version was never committed or pushed via git. The maintainer signs his commits, and v1 releases were using OIDC and provenance attestations. The malicious package versions were published locally using the npm cli after the maintainer's machine was compromised via a RAT; there's no way for package maintainers to disable/forbid local publication on npmjs.

It seems the Axios team was largely practicing what you're preaching. To the extent they aren't: it still wouldn't have prevented this compromise.

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I can not find a single signed recent commit on the axios repo. It is totally yolo mode. Those "signed by github" signatures are meaningless. I stand by my comment in full.

One must sign commits -universally- and -also- sign reviews/merges (multi-party) and then -also- do multi party signing on releases. Doing only one step of basic supply chain security unfortunately buys you about as much defense as locking only a single door.

I do however certainly assign significant blame to the NPM team though for repeatedly refusing optional package signing support so packages with signing enabled can be refused at the server and client if unsigned by a quorum of pinned keys, but even aside from that if packages were signed manually then canary tools could have detected this immediately.

What you sign or don't sign in your Git repo doesn't matter because NPM doesn't publish from a Git repo. Signing commits is still useful for your contributors and downstream forks but it won't have any effect on the users who use your package via NPM.

I think NPM is fully to blame here. Packages that exceed a certain level of popularity should require signing/strong 2FA. They should implement more schemes that publishers can optionally enable, like requiring mandatory sign-off from more than 1 maintainer before the package is available to download.

Then on the package page it should say: "[Warning] Weak publishing protection" or "[Checkmark] This package requires sign-off from accountA and accountB to publish".

2FA was mandated by npm

they had 2FA, but likely software TOTP (so it was either autofilled via 1password (or similar), or they were able to steal the seed)

at this point I think publishing an npm app and asking people to scan a QR with it is the easiest way (so people don't end up with 1 actual factor)

What they need to mandate is hardware anchored passkeys/fido2/webauthn for both auth and package signing, with the -option- to sign with PGP for those that have well trusted PGP keys.

They won't do this, I have talked to them plenty of times about it. But, if they did, the supply chain attacks would almost entirely stop.

Don't need to require hardware 2fa tokens. Just a mobile app would be sufficient. Publish to a staging area then require confirmation on mobile to make it go live. Maybe include a diff of changes files for good measure.

And even a mobile app (or, in fact, any single-person 2FA) would be unnecessary if we had a requirement for another live person to approve the release. As a bonus, a two-maintainers-required setup would also improve resilience against one of them going rogue or getting tortured.

So you think the answer is replacing a requirement for a 6-digit 2FA code that can be typed into the npm publishing CLI with a requirement for a device that has a camera that can scan a QR code and then... what? What does the QR code do on the device? How does the npm CLI present the QR code?

Simply supporting passkeys gives people domain locked login via qr/phone, or any fido2 usb device. No more keyboard entry required for login other than username, which means phishing is off the table. Standards are great if we can get anyone to use them.

Like I said. One must sign commits -universally- and -also- sign reviews/merges (multi-party) and then -also- do multi party signing on releases. The code in the release must match the code from git, or no publish.

Until NPM can enforce those basic checks though, you have to roll your own CI to do it yourself, but large well funded widely used projects have an obligation to do the basics to protect their users, and their own reputations, from impersonation.

I agree, I just think it's pointless to discuss Axios' commit-signing practices or lack thereof when NPM doesn't support any of it. It seems like axios was already using Trusted Publishing [1] and it still didn't get caught.

You said that you "also" blame NPM, but they're the only party who should get any blame until they get their shit together.

[1] https://github.com/axios/axios/issues/10636#issuecomment-418...

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