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

This happens because there's no auditing of new packages or versions. The distro's maintainer and the developer is the same person.

The general solution is to do what Debian does.

Keep a stable distro where new packages aren't added and versions change rarely (security updates and bugfixes only, no new functionality). This is what most people use.

Keep a testing/unstable distro where new packages and new versions can be added, but even then added only by the distro maintainer, NOT by the package developers. This is where the audits happen.

NPM, Python, Rust, Go, Ruby all suffer from this problem, because they have centralized and open package repositories.

Go’s package repository is just GitHub.

At the end of the day, it’s all a URL.

You’re asking for a blessed set of URLs. You’d have to convince someone to spend time maintaining that.

Golang at least gives you the option to easily vendor-ize packages to your local repository. Given what has happened here, maybe we should start doing this more!