Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

100% agree. I hated this post because it's all based on this unfounded assumption as an axiom, which it presents using zero evidence.

Different groups have different risks tolerances, and it's absurd to think that nobody is going to pull releases before the default cool down period.

View on HN

> it's absurd to think that nobody is going to pull releases before the default cool down period.

Why is that absurd? It seems like a more likely outcome than just assuming there are enough "security researchers" out there doing this for every package?! IMO both sides here seem to have no evidence that the other is wrong.

Because security companies/researches are doing just that. The vast majority of recent supply chain attacks have only lasted minutes to hours. A large portion of them were credential losses or tag takeovers that aren't hard to detect, but by the time you do, your CI/CD has already downloaded and ran the attack 200 times.

Actually, you make an excellent point. Account takeovers have been responsible for a number of recent high profile attacks. Even if there are 0 security researchers reviewing new releases, just having time for the real owner to announce that a release was fraudulent before it's downloaded by half the Internet is a huge boon.

This entire article seems to say that if it doesn't prevent 100% of all possible attacks that it's "security theater". That's nonsense. It's just one more tool in the tool belt, and a highly useful one at that.

> The vast majority of recent supply chain attacks have only lasted minutes to hours

More claims without evidence! And how are you even going to defend that claim when it’s absolutely possible that lots of attacks are not even detected?!

Because I can always bump up the cooldown period. I'm not naive in thinking that I never have to worry about anything with a cooldown period, but having rolling releases is inherently what cooldowns give you. Companies have been doing rolling releases on their own products for years because it's a lot easier to handle when something falls over for a small percentage of users that when in nukes everyone all at once. That same concept still applies here.

It's worded a bit strongly, but it encourages critical thinking about downloading dependencies, how vetting should work, and where the human factor comes in. I think the top comment was right that some security researchers will audit packages no matter what, but it's good to not take that for granted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com