Node.js security advisories | Hacker News Reader

Node.js security advisories

nodesecurity.io

40 pointsnodejs-news13 comments

I like the idea of having a centralized repository of these advisories, but I need a better way of watching for changes for this to be effective. I was hoping that the Twitter feed would be that (I would just turn on SMS notification), but the Twitter feed is full of general low-value tweets like "Thanks @espreto for being our 1000th follower!". Perhaps a separate Twitter feed could be created (@nodesecurityadvisories?) that only tweets when new advisories are posted on the site?

I think the security checker from Sensio labs is the best approach to this. You can upload your composer file, which is really the list of packages you use and they'll check it against the known reports for various Symfony modules. It's got both the API and its own module with a CLI tool, so you can easily integrate it into monitoring. https://security.sensiolabs.org/

I really wish other projects had something like that (rubygems, pypi, etc.)

There actually does exist one for Ruby. Check out gemcanary https://gemcanary.com/

and https://gemnasium.com (which supports npm as well)

Can't this be made simpler. Something like a cli call npm vulnerable This could take the package.json and list which of my packages need to be upgraded or downgraded to be secure as per the known issues database.

That's brilliant, but the search operates on titles, the /package/:name route appears to be broken and there's no RSS. I give up.

it could also be run automatically when cd-ing into a directory by overriding the default cd

    cd() {
      builtin cd $*
      if [ -f "package.json" ] ; then
        npm check-vulnerabilities
      fi
    }

I reckon you could also use this with david[0] to check if packages are up to date.

[0] https://github.com/alanshaw/david

I did not mean outdated. npm outdated can do that. See https://npmjs.org/doc/cli/npm-outdated.html I was looking insecure version of the same through a public repo.

At least a RSS stream will be needed ?!

That connect vulnerability is pretty significant. Makes me pay attention despite the fact there's no way to syndicate the feed.

How does node.js have security advisories? Isn't the fact that it's built on top of JavaScript kind of throw the idea of security out the window to start with? Shouldn't we start with JavaScript security advisories first?

Honest question, have you ever seen a public Javascript security advisory?

>> Isn't the fact that it's built on top of JavaScript kind of throw the idea of security out the window to start with

No.

>> Shouldn't we start with JavaScript security advisories

Its a language, not a specific implementation of a language. Chromes javascript engine is what would have security vulnerabilities, no javascript itself.

This isn't security advisories for node itself, it is for node modules. the node security project is auditing all of the modules in npm for security issues, and posting about them there.

>> Its a language, not a specific implementation of a language.

It's not even that, it's a dialect of ECMAScript.

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