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

npm in itself isn't special at all, maybe the userbase is but that's irrelevant because the mitigation is pretty easy and 99.9999% effective, works for every package manager and boils down to:

1- thoroughly and fully analyze any dependency tree you plan to include 2- immediately freeze all its versions 3- never update without very good reason or without repeating 1 and 2

in other words: simply be professional, face logical consequences if you aren't. if you think one package manager is "safer" than others because magic reasons odds are you'll find out the hard way sooner or later.

Your item #1 there may be simple, but that's not the same as being easy.

Good luck with nr 1 in the js ecosystem and its 30k dependencies 50 branches deep per package

As an outsider looking in as I don't deal with NPM on a daily basis, the 30k dependencies going 50 branches deep seems to be the real problem here. Code reuse is an admiral goal but this seems absurd. I have no idea if these numbers are correct or exaggerations but from my limited time working with NPM a year or two ago it seems like it's a definite problem.

I'm in the C ecosystem mostly. Is one NPM package the equivalent of one object file? Can NPM packages call internal functions for their dependencies instead of relying so heavily on bringing in so many external ones? I guess it's a problem either way, internal dependencies having bugs vs supply chain attacks like these. Doesn't bringing in so many dependencies lead to a lot of dead code and much larger codebases then necessary?

> Is one NPM package the equivalent of one object file?

No. The closest thing to a package (on almost every language) is an entire library.

> Can NPM packages call internal functions for their dependencies instead of relying so heavily on bringing in so many external ones?

Yes, they can. They just don't do it.

> Doesn't bringing in so many dependencies lead to a lot of dead code and much larger codebases then necessary?

There aren't many unecessary dependencies, because the number of direct dependencies on each package is reasonable (on the order of 10). And you don't get a lot of unecessary code because the point of tiny libraries is to only import what you need.

Dead code is not the problem, instead the JS mentality evolved that way to minimize dead code. The problem is that dead code is actually not that much of an issue, but dependency management is.

agreed, bad wording. it so happens though that sw development includes many problems and practices that aren't easy and are still part of the job.

there are indeed monster packages but you should ask yourself if you need them at all, because if you really do there is no way around performing nr1. you get the code, you own it. you propagate malware by negligence, you're finished as a sw engineer. simple as that.

personally i keep dependencies at a minimum and are very picky with them, partly because of nr1, but as a general principle. of course if people happily suck in entire trees without supervision just to print ansi colors on the terminal or, as in this case, use fancy aliases for colors then bad things are bound to happen. (tbf tinycolor has one single devDependency, shim-deno-test, which only requires typescript. that should be manageable)

i'll grant you that the js ecosystem is special, partly because the business has traditionally reinforced the notion of it being accessory, superficial and not "serious" development. well, that's just naivety, it is as critical a component as any other. ideally you should even have a security department vetting the dependencies for you.

Do tell: how many packages are in your dependency graph?

I bet it's hundreds.

Jest alone adds 300 packages.

Consequently I doubt that you in fact "thoroughly and fully" analyzed all your dependencies.

Unless what you're shipping isn't a feature rich app, what you proposed seems entirely unrealistic.