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Comment by bluefox | Hacker News Reader

Is the advisory genuine?

It links to the github repo, where the latest commit is from 2018 for version 1.2.8.

It links to npmjs page, that shows 48 versions, where the latest version is 1.2.8 from "3 years ago".

Yet it has 1.2.9/1.3.9/2.3.9 for "Affected versions".

Did npmjs "revert" these versions and any clue of their existence? The npmjs page links to dominictarr's repository. The npmjs site doesn't seem to have a "who owns this package name" besides the repository/homepage links. Very confusing.

I remember some years ago there was some story involving the original author's handing maintainership rights to some shady dude. Is it about that time, or is it about something more current?

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Practically all package managers (NuGet, crates.io, NPM, etc...) are decoupled from the source code. What you download is NOT necessarily what's in GitHub.

I pointed this flaw out repeatedly in the Rust forums when there were discussions related to improvements that could be to crates.io. They made it very clear that "everyone understands" that crates themselves are the "source of truth", and that nobody should be doing security reviews by going to GitHub or wherever.

So what happens in reality?

Precisely what you just did. People instinctively click the source repo link, and browse around in the GitHub history view to "see what happened".

Sigh.

It's like trying to explain to someone that the cargo lift design of the Death Star is dangerous without handrails. Then someone points out that when you signed up to be a Stormtrooper on the Death Star there was a clause in the contract (page 537 paragraph 7) that clearly states that it is your responsibility to avoid fatal falls due to precipitous ledges.

I think I remember discussing this briefly in #rust with you. It's clearly not the case that "everyone understands" how these package managers actually work, but I'd rather see the reality become more obvious than give up and shackle these package ecosystems to Microsoft even harder than they already are.

NPM, Cargo, and the like are basically like the people saving a link to a random Wikipedia article, and then making the shocked Pikachu face when their presentation in front of the boss shows a defaced article with the Goatse picture in the middle of it.

There's a solution to this problem, of course. The Wikipedia team provides the tools you need! You can link to a specific revision of an article so there are no surprises. What you saw when you reviewed the content is what you get when you project it in the board room, or send out that mass email that includes your boss.

Similarly the solution for crates.io could be as simple as having hyperlinks go only to specific commit hashes. And then require that the crate content match the hash.

These days I hear a lot of developers complain that they "Just want to...". I always complete the sentence with "... ignore my responsibilities."

Package managers are in the same camp. "I just want to distribute packages.". Okay, sure, but your responsibility is to do it so that downstream consumers fall into the pit of success and aren't burned by supply-chain attacks.

You can argue, or you can start working on catching up to the encyclopedia people that came from a background in porn hosting and start taking security seriously.

> require that the crate content match the [commit] hash.

If you want to audit a crate, you don't need to require that it "matches" anything else, you can just audit the crate. Download the source tarball from the same URL that Cargo would and audit it. I think the problem with crates.io is that it just gives you the GitHub link (possibly misleading - bad!) and doesn't just give you a button to download or browse the tarball that Cargo actually uses (what you see is what you get).

Defining "matches" and enforcing it against a remote Git repository is non-trivial. It gets worse with NPM because those packages are sometimes the output of the Typescript compiler or Webpack, so now you need reproducible builds (a huge task) and a CI infrastructure to validate them. Nuget distributes .dll files, which often aren't even open source. There's no hope to enforce a correspondence with a Git repository there. A developer who wants to audit a Nuget package has no choice but to decompile it.

NPM clearly has a malware problem, and Cargo will eventually have one because it really wants to be like NPM. I'm not convinced that what you propose is the solution.

I get it. My mistake. Page 537 paragraph 7. I must have just missed it on the first reading of the contract.

I won't make that particular mistake again.

But just like the thousands (and thousands!) of people that are befuddled as to why Rust's console output is slower than Python, it's a pit of failure that others fill fall into.

Over and over. And over.

I saw in one of the repos the maintainer confused about what happened, seemly someone somehow impersonated him and released new versions to npm without actually touching the repo itself!

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