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Comment by ljm | Hacker News Reader

So when do we call out NPM as an easy supply chain vector and also Microsoft's ownership of NPM and their prioritisation of AI at any cost.

NPM is the windows of package managers right now.

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People have for years. The real question is do people enjoy not putting any thought into their super convenient JavaScript stack too much to actually do anything about it. Delaying updating to new packages assuming the vulnerability will be discovered in two days or whatever is putting a knee brace on a leg that needs to be amputated. Sooner or later there will be a vulnerability good enough to not be caught in a couple days, or a zero-day damaging enough that not updating immediately is a huge risk. Assuming they won’t be in anything critical enough to disastrously compromise your stack is wishful thinking at its finest.

The part that always gets me is I tend to only install a few packages like React and maybe some kind of data access layer. But you let that recurse down a few levels and suddenly you've installed a thousand packages, some of them hopelessly obsolete, some of them for patently stupid things that are 1 line of code, etc, etc. I.E. you can't choose to be thoughtful if the main entry points into the language are all built on a pile of garbage.

Oh yeah, for sure. The problem (mostly) isn’t people installing packages willy-nilly: it’s that the attack surface is fractal, which is just plain nuts.

Now that npm supports --before, yarn supports npmMinimumAge, and pnpm supports minimumReleaseAge, it's quite possible to stay safe and avoid acciasional bleeding-edge upgrades. Stay a couple months into the past, give testers time to look at newer releases and vet their safety (or report an exploit attempt).

--before doesn't save you globally, only min-release-age does, which is in npm since March iirc.

npm's immaturity is arguably demonstrated by the fact it is always catching up.

Please correct me if I'm wrong but signed packages are still impractical in NPM which is why supply chain attacks still work by editing existing versions or pushing new point releases without a signature.

Or if you put all of the credentials in GitHub actions which is even more trivially exploitable through the actions marketplace because it is just git with a thin proxy, you have an even wider attack vector

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