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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: 0.222s | source
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Meneth ◴[16 Sep 25 12:25 UTC] No.45261303[source]▶
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.

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1. pabs3 ◴[17 Sep 25 02:09 UTC] No.45270753[source]▶
To be clear, Debian does not audit code like you might be suggesting they do. There are checks for licensing, source code being missing, build reproducibility, tests and other things. There is some static analysis with lintian, but not systematically at the source code level with tools like cppcheck or rust-analyzer or similar. Auditing the entirety of the code for security issues just isn't feasible for package maintainers. Malware might be noticed while looking for other issues, that isn't guaranteed though, the XZ backdoor wasn't picked up by Debian.

https://lintian.debian.org/