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

Not much has changed since then. The best counter-example I know is esbuild, which is a fully featured bundler/minifier/etc that has zero external dependencies except for the Go stdlib + one package maintained by the Go project itself:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/esbuild?activeTab=dependencies

https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/blob/755da31752d759f1ea70b8...

Other "next generation" projects are trading one problematic ecosystem for another. When you study dependency chains of e.g. biomejs and swc, it looks pretty good:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@biomejs/biome/v/latest?active...

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@swc/types?activeTab=dependenc...

Replacing the tire fire of eslint (and its hundreds to low thousands of dependencies) with zero of them! Very encouraging, until you find the Rust source:

https://github.com/biomejs/biome/blob/a0039fd5457d0df18242fe...

https://github.com/swc-project/swc/blob/6c54969d69551f516032...

I think as these projects gain more momentum, we will see similar things cropping up in the cargo ecosystem.

Does anyone know of other major projects written in as strict a style as esbuild?

These kind of projects usually are pretty great because they aim to work with CGO_ENABLED=0 so the libs are very portable and work with different syscall backends.

Additionally I really like to go mod vendor my snapshot of dependencies which is great for short term fixes, but it won't fix the cause in the long run.

However, the go ecosystem is just as vulnerable here because of lack of signing off package updates. As long as there's no verification possible end-to-end when it comes to "who signed this package" then there's no way this will get better.

Additionally most supply chaib attacks focussed on the CI/CD infrastructure in the past, because they are just as broken with just as many problems. There needs to be a better CI/CD workflow where signing keys don't have to be available on the runners themselves, otherwise this will just shift the attack surface to a different location.

In my opinion the package managers are somewhat to blame here, too. They should encourage and mandate gpg signatures, and especially in git commits when they rely on git tags for distribution.

I'm interested in knowing whether there's something intrinsic to Go that encourages such a culture.

IMO, it might be due to the fact that Go mod came rather late in the game, while NPM was introduced near the beginning of NodeJS. But it might be more related to Go's target audience being more low-level, where such tools are less ubiquitous?