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Comment by illumen | Hacker News Reader

npmjs still contains the package: https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=rimrafall https://www.npmjs.com/package/rimrafall

'0 downloads in the last month'

There is no 'report package' button. The support link goes to a 'we are hiring' contact form. Report bad packages as security issues? https://www.npmjs.com/security

Package signing. Review process. Scanning tools for dangerous packages. As a user, don't trust anything and isolate containers and jails. Ban bad actors. Charge for a curated package index.

Lots of other plugin stores do better than npm.

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"Scanning tools for dangerous packages"

This seems like an impossible problem (essentially the halting problem). On Linux perhaps you could build packages in a container then copy the results to the installation directory, but there's no guarantee require("rimrafall") won't just "child_process.exec('rm -rf /')".

At the very least, they could install packages in a VM and check that the VM can be rebooted.

Then someone could just craft a package that deletes every file except the ones required for booting...

I had the same thing - they have an abuse@ email in the Code of Conduct link that appears on every page. The email is the first thing listed. I've contacted them.

The package has now been removed.

that's interesting. Any pointers to package stores that do a better job on security? I'm researching the area a bit at the moment and I've not seen a lot of good practice out there, so would be interesting to have some good examples to hold up.

Fedora and RHEL have had mandatory signing since before either existed (back when it was RHL).

Debian has had what we'd call 'EV' level security these days for about 15 years - people bringing their passports in and reading out their GPG public keys at LUGs.

We haven't developed far enough for a package store at this point, but this is one of the use cases we're hoping to explore as part of our capability-based shell scripting language: shill-lang.org.

cool. If you're looking for thoughts about threat models and ways to do it http://theupdateframework.com/index.html seems to have some good info.

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