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Part of the issue is that FOSS, libraries, and independendent package managers and their specific repositories have exploded in about every domain. No longer ar
by Frost1x 5y ago
Part of the issue is that FOSS, libraries, and independendent package managers and their specific repositories have exploded in about every domain. No longer are there a handful of places where software and libraries exist. Pick an ecosystem and there's probably a sub or additional levels of package/library management ecosystems below it. Developers have really bought into grabbing a package for everything and leveraging hundreds and thousands of packages, most of which have limited to no sort of vetting. We've had software complexity growing over the years, but the one benefit in previous years is that it was in fairly concentrated areas where many eyes were often watching. You could somewhat rely on the fact that someone had looked through and approved such additions to a package repo. It's a naive security but there were more professional eyes you could leverage, lowering overall risk.
Not anymore, it's more of this breakneck speed, leverage every package you can to save resources and glue them together without looking at them in detail, because the entire reason you're using them is because you don't have time. It's not all shops, plenty of teams vet or roll their own functionality to avoid this but there's a large world of software out there that just blindly trusts everything down the chain in an era where there should be less trust. Some software shops have never seen a package or library they didn't like and will use even trivial to implement packages (the benefit of your own implementation being you know it's secure and won't change under your feet unless an inside threat makes the change). There's a tradeoff to externalizing costs and tech debt for maintainance you pass on using these systems, the cost being you take on more risk in various forms.