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Comment by blm126 | Hacker News Reader

The one week cooldown option is not relying on other users to be a canary for you. Its just giving automated scanners a chance to notice. This is the perfect example. I don't think step security found this by accident. They are actively monitoring NPM package releases at some level.

There is something to be said that Microsoft should be scanning packages pre-release. They aren't, though, so for right now there is a ton of value with very little downside if people implement a one week cooldown period.

To answer your question directly, though. If everyone else moves to a one week cooldown, I would absolutely suggest a two week cooldown is a good idea. Being the "slow" moving organization is a good security trade-off so long as you don't take it to extremes and have escape hatches when you actually need to be moving quickly.

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There's a really bad implicit assumption in there: Microsoft's scanners have solved the halting problem, so they can tell if a package update will ever flip to malicious mode, or has an intentionally inserted security hole in it.

Of course, this also assumes that Microsoft's internal scanners are much better than the scanners available to the attackers, since any reasonable attacker is going to just run their obfuscated code through a scanner as part of their CI job. (And maybe even use the MS scanner as an oracle by submitting fragments to NPM to see which pieces of their exploit chain get flagged.)

Waiting until everyone else canaries is much stronger, but even that doesn't work on a targeted attack.

Thank you for the thorough response. I got the following from yours and other responses:

* The JS ecosystem has been and will most likely continue to be fast-moving, so it's quite a safe assumption that at no point will a quarantine period be wide-spread.

* This quarantine period is for (semi-)automated scanners to catch the issue. Although considering the above there will always be a non-zero amount of end-user canaries as well.

* Maybe NPM should run scanners before distributing malware?

* If the ecosystem by any chance adopts a week-long quarantine period, you'd be safer if you applied a longer quarantine period.

> Maybe NPM should run scanners before distributing malware?

I suspect there's always a human checking these results. If NPM straight out rejects an update due to suspected malware, they might end up rejecting correct updates as well. If they grant some "safe" patterns a special pass, they might get exploited.

So I think this only works if you have security scanners that are well-maintained and kept in secret. NPM folks could of course co-operate with some security companies to have a first stab with the releases before they are put to public access. At some point some parties might start want to have monetary compensation for such an arragnement, though.

Look, nobody requested fully automated scanners that are never wrong. A scanner that asks the project owner to sign in with 2fa and confirm the release in case it's been flagged is going to be more than sufficient.

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