Cooldown Support for Ruby Bundler
blog.rubygems.org
blog.rubygems.org
So, just like COVID-19 used air travel, modern malware attacks are relying on GitHub+dependabot to speed up the spread.
Even for single page website built using Vue, I would get about 5 updates a week.
For dependabot it's as simple as
cooldown.default-days: 1
There are security researchers (that don't have cooldowns) that usually detect compromises within hours or less, and package managers almost always manage to remove the offending versions in less than 24 hours (usually much less).
So people will 24 hours cooldowns get protected.
Shameless plug: I maintain depsguard.com that tries to simplify cooldowns setup across anything that supports it, in one command (it scans from where you run it, e.g. if you run it from your user folder it will look for any local repos with dependabot / renovate and suggest a change.
Most people stick to default of 0. In fact, I am realizing over time that it is best to make it 7-14 days.
It seems like the advice right now is to become a freerider while there are still people installing closer to release that will do free work for you finding out there's something nasty in the release.
Once everyone is waiting 2 weeks to install an update, then the value of everyone waiting goes down dramatically.
In this case, since the number of cool down days is configurable, even if everyone was using it we would still likely see a somewhat smooth curve for adoption, since not everyone will choose the same delay and the delay time will likely map closely to how people want to habdke risk.
It's all a trade off, just like it's always been. This just makes it simpler to act on what you want your risk/comfort level to be.
Just as users are incentivized to avoid malware, researchers and attackers are equally motivated to be the first to discover it.
The concern trolling around widespread dependency cooldowns doesn't make sense. Most people shouldn't be eager to download a release that hasn't made its way through at least some scans.
Every security company and their cousin wants to be the one to find the next big dependency malware.
People are encouraged by package managers to treat any bit of code someone tosses onto a package manager as equivalent in reliability to the core language and sdk.
I think it remains to be seen whether the economics of this kind of “supply chain” compromise support a stealthier actor profile: the whole reason to compromise an OSS project rather than exploit a single victim’s browser or phone is to smash-and-grab en masse. That’s a fundamentally noisy and delay-sensitive attacker profile.
More than I think should be, frankly. More than enough for a sustainable industry.
As for “which firms”: if you Google any of the recent dependency compromises, you’ll see their names. My rough guess is that there are somewhere between 12 and 20 active players in the “supply chain security” space, and they generally compete for mindshare with blogspam. That’s not to say their scanning results aren’t good, though.
You need an early release in the "given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow" world because you need the eyeballs, but if you count on specialists and scanners no general availability release is necessary and hence no cool down.
the releases will be delayed for the same time period, but you increase the amount of coordination required significantly and reduce user agency.
One idea to get out of this mess is to use cooldowns. But this idea only works if what GP said is true: Vulnerabilities are mostly found by (paid) specialists and advanced tools and not the general user populations.
My point is that, if that is true we do not need to release insecure software. Do the magic before the release and no one gets hurt.
It is true if everyone waits a cooldown (I don't like this name, but that's another thing) period, then it doesn't solve anything, but as others have pointed out, just because you don't build off the cooldown doesn't mean you and others aren't watching the releases.
Closing the window makes the burden of hiding the exploit higher, which is I think objectively an improvement of security posture.
in the "find the vulnerability before release" scenario, how do I push version foo-3.5? is it my responsibility as the package author to find a security firm and have them audit it before submitting to the repository? should the org owning the repository shunt my package update to a holding pen until it can be vetted, and if so do they have to pay a designated security firm and give them special access to the holding pen, or can anyone reads the incoming packages and help vet them? and if no one has looked at a package in a while do you delay it indefinitely or so you let it time out and be released? that's basically back to the cooldown idea, only implemented on the server rather than the client, and therefore not letting individual clients tune what they believe is a good cooldown time.
Except there is lots to gain from being the first to write about the new malware on some registry, so companies are actively downloading and inspecting literally every package.
Back in the day (maybe 6-7 years ago?) you could detect this by uploading a new npm package that hit back some endpoint in your control, and it was almost guaranteed that this endpoint got a request within a minute of publishing a new package or update to existing one with users. Nowadays I think none of the scanners actually run the code, mostly static-analysis, and I dunno how often the npm download counter updates per day, probably harder to see in real-time.
Show me the company writing to their customers “we intentionally decided to ship code with potentially novel vulnerabilities. One of those vulnerabilities caused disclosure of your data, but cheer up! We have this cool security blog post about it now.” Meanwhile their competitors freeride and their customers’ data is safe.
> there is lots to gain from being the first to write about the new malware on some registry, so *companies* are actively downloading and inspecting literally every package.
(Emphasis mine)
we are.
"companies" in this context is "security companies" (hence why they are "downloading and inspecting every package", which would not make sense if referring to the people authoring and shipping a single package)
How is that not an easy exploit to circumvent the cooldown?
If not, and the current defacto standard gem server doesn't accept v1 anymore, we're good I suppose?
Unless you can compromise the gem server to overwrite created_at fields, I don't see any exploits here.
Private gem servers are either already trusted (if they're your own) or already under some scrutiny and extra care already being taken (ideally), but this last case applies to very few projects I'm sure.
All of this cooldown stuff is so mind bogglingly stupid...
How active is rubygems.org itself? I retired when the 100k download threshold was installed onto developers there; on github I don't have any such restriction pertaining to code I publish and maintain. But even before that restriction, numerous gems were abandoned. I understand that this is a natural cycle anyway, but without an influx of new developers, ruby will fossilize and age out just as perl did before.
None of those "cooldowns" will bring in new developers either. It all seems to be about meta-appeasing companies; this could indirectly help, but I doubt it will help much.