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Shai-Hulud malware attack: Tinycolor and over 40 NPM packages compromised

(socket.dev)
1208 points jamesberthoty | 1 comments | 16 Sep 25 11:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.206s | source
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l___l ◴[16 Sep 25 11:48 UTC] No.45260940[source]▶
Is there a theoretical framework that can prevent this from happening? Proof-carrying code?
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killerstorm ◴[16 Sep 25 11:56 UTC] No.45261022[source]▶
Object-capability model / capability-based security.

Do not let code to have access to things it's not supposed to access.

It's actually that simple. If you implemented a function which formats a string, it should not have access to `readFile`, for example.

Retrofitting it into JS isn't possible, though, as language is way too dynamic - self-modifying code, reflection, etc, means there's no isolation between modules.

In a language which is less dynamic it might be as easy as making a white-list for imports.

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pjc50 ◴[16 Sep 25 12:11 UTC] No.45261167[source]▶
People have tried this, but in practice it's quite hard to do because then you have to start treating individual functions as security boundaries - if you can't readFile, just find a function which does it for you.

The situation gets better in monadic environments (can't readFile without the IO monad, and you cant' call anything which would read it).

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1. killerstorm ◴[16 Sep 25 12:43 UTC] No.45261455[source]▶
Well, to me it looks like people are unreasonably eager to use "pathologically dynamic" languages like JS & Python, and it's an impossible problem in a highly dynamic environment where you can just randomly traverse and change objects.

Programming languages which are "static" (or, basically, sane) you can identify all imports of a module/library, and, basically, ban anything which isn't "pure" part of stdlib.

If your module needs to work with files, it will receive an object which lets it to work with files.

A lot of programming languages implement object-capability model: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-capability_model it doesn't seem to be hard at all. It's just programmers have preference for shittier languages, just like they prefer C which doesn't even have language-level array bound checking (for a lack of a "dynamic array" concept on a language level).

I think it's sort of orthogonal to "pure functional" / monadic: if you have unrestricted imports you can import some shit like unsafePerformIO, right? You have another level of control, of course (i.e. you just need to ban unsafePerformIO and look for unlicensed IO) but I don't feel like ocap requires Haskell