There is also not too much legitimacy to the fact that Rust packages can run unsandboxed when they build themselves.

install scripts are a distraction, just like package signatures are a distraction. adding/removing either feature has no significant impact on the wormability of this package ecosystem. installed npm code is run, with nearly zero exceptions.

Security issues aside, they are a nightmare in enterprise environments where internet and OS access is heavily restricted.

This doesn't really fix the issue though because package code is also executed at build time and during testing. Just maybe restricts the scope a little bit.

...and only if you invoke it with --dangerously-run-postinstall-scripts; otherwise it will report an error if a postinstall script is found.

This is definitely going to affect any packages that need to link to native code and/or compile shims, but these are very few.

Same vibe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOTyUfOHgas

the onion article is still up could link that

Just dont use npm. Use a package manager which doesn't execute postinstall by default. The switch is incredibly simple.

It is 100% up to the package manager's steward to control how ownership of packages and namespaces are granted.

Maven Central exists for decades the amount of incidents of people stealing namespaces is minimal.

One can't simply publish a package under the groupId "com.ycombinator" without having some way to verify that they own the domain ycombinator.com. Then, once a package is published, it is 100% immutable, even if it has malicious code in it. Certainly, that library is flagged everywhere as vulnerable.

It baffles me that NPM for so long couldn't replicate the same guardrails as Maven Central.

Part of the point the article makes is that most other popular languages have a comprehensive standard library. JS has an astonishingly small on. Rather than have one vetted set of libraries that ship with the language, applications either need to roll it themselves or pull from a 3rd party package repository. We've drilled NIH into people, so they tend to reach for packages. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it often means they're pulling in more code than they need. The JS ecosystem has also favored smaller modules, so you need many of them. And everyone builds on top of that, leading to massive growth in dependency graphs. It's a huge surface area for things to go wrong, intentionally or not.

With many other languages, you have a lot of functionality out of the box. Certainly, there have been bugs and security issues, but they're a drop in the bucket compared to what you see in the JS ecosystem. With other languages, you have a much smaller external dependency graph and the core functionality is coming from a trusted 3rd party.

To be honest Rust has the exact same supply chain attack pattern - it's just newer and more maintained at the moment. Give it a decade.

> It seems like it might just be that Python/npm are juicier targets?

Attackers go where the victims are. Frontend is a monoculture with the vast majority using NPM; backend, less so. This isn't an excuse for NPM, but another strike against it.

You could also argue that the attacks make a deeper point about frontend vs backend devs, but I won't go there.

Last I checked npm had 2FA for publishing, but cargo didn't. I don't think cargo is any better than npm, just not that of an attractive target.

none. they just have smaller target populations.

I suppose that go's go:generate workflow can also be abused to land a worm like the ones spreading via npm, as you can build programs that just scrape the whole hard drive for git projects and patch the go.mod dependencies there, and you could also just write this in go as a toolchain script, for example.

NPM's achilles is the pre/postinstall step which can run arbitrary commands and shell scripts without the user having any way to intervene.

Dependencies must be run in isolated chroot sandboxes or better, inside containers. That would be the only way to mitigate this problem, as the filesystem of the operating system must be separated from the filesystem of the development workflow.

On top of that most host based firewalls are per-binary instead of per-cmdline. That leads to the warnings and rules relying on that e.g. "python" or "nodejs" getting network access allowlisted, instead of say "nodejs myworm.js". So firewalls in general are pretty useless against this type of malware.

Generally, other package managers aren't great either. Notably, crates.io / cargo has some of the same people behind it as NPM and the verbiage of their excuses is oddly similar.

Something fascinating about the design and architecture of programming languages and their surrounding ecosystems is the enormous leverage that they provide to the "core team":

For every 1 core language developer[1]...

... there may be 1,000 popular package developers...

... for which there may be 1,000,000 developers writing software...

... for over 1,000,000,000 users.

This means that for every corner that is cut at the top of that pyramid, the harms are massively magnified at the lower tiers. A security vulnerability in a "top one thousand" package like log4j can cause billions of dollars in economic damage, man-centuries of remediation effort, etc.

However, bizarrely, the funding at the top two levels is essentially a pittance! Most such projects are charities, begging for spare change with hat in hand on a street corner. Some of the most used libraries are often volunteer efforts! cough-OpenSSL-cough.

The result is that the people most empowered to fix the issues are the least funded to do so.

This is why NPM, Crates.io, etc... flatly refuse to do even the most basic security checks like adding namespaces and verifying the identity of major publishers like Google, Microsoft, and the like.

That's a non-zero amount of effort, and no matter how trivial to implement technically and now cheap to police, it would likely blow their tiny budget of unreliable donations.

The exceptions to this rule are package-managers with robust financial backing, such as NuGet, which gets reliable funding from Microsoft and supports their internal (for-profit!) workflows almost as much as it does external "free" users.

"Free and open" is wonderful and all, but you get what you pay for.

[1] Most of us can name them off the top of our heads: Guido van Rossum, Larry Wall, Kerningham & Richie, etc.

UV adoption is happening, though. NPM is still the only name in town.

Apparently it does now: https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/pylock...

https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/cli/pip_lock/

But who cares about pip, uv is here.

I don't know about snails, but everything I'm in contact with has moved over to uv, and I can't imagine I'm the only one.

The NIH mentality in the ecosystem would result in a JavaScript pgp library which itself would be an npm package and subject to supply chain attacks. lol.

Would that help? Most of these recent attacks, the attackers have gained access to the system that builds the packages. So it would have just signed the malicious build the same.

subtree is better for this case, you want to encourage actual reading before running. reading won't catch everything but it catches a lot, and the burden isn't as high as people always complain about before they try it.