NPM debug and chalk packages compromised

After all these incidents, I still can't understand why package registries don't require cryptographic signatures on every package. It introduces a bit more friction (developers downloading CI artifacts and manually signing and uploading them), but it prevents most security incidents. Of course, this can fail if it's automated by some CI/CD system, as those are apparently easily compromised.

Real registries do[1], npm is just amateur-hour which is why its usage is typically forbidden in enterprise contexts.

[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-debian-manual/de...

In all fairness—npm belongs to GitHub, which belongs to Microsoft. Amateur-hour is both not a valid excuse anymore, and also a boring explanation. GitHub is going to great lengths to enable SLSA attestations for secure tool chains; there must be systemic issues in the JS ecosystem that make an implementation of proper attestations infeasible right now, everything else wouldn't really make sense.

So if we're discussing anything here, why not what this reason is, instead of everyone praising their favourite package registry?

The NPM team has repeatedly commented that it's "too hard", effectively, and would discourage new developers from publishing packages. See:

https://github.com/npm/npm/pull/4016#issuecomment-76316744

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38645969

https://github.com/npm/cli/commit/5a3b345d6d5d175ea9ec967364...