3 ms·
I feel that that is one of those ideas that sound great in theory, but is impractical in reality. There are way too many packages with similar names already but
by stingraycharles 4y ago
I feel that that is one of those ideas that sound great in theory, but is impractical in reality. There are way too many packages with similar names already but are completely valid.
What makes me wonder is why it’s always NPM that’s hit with these kind of things, and not, say, Maven? Arguably the attack surface of Maven is much larger and intrusive (lots of enterprises), but the mechanisms of package distribution are completely different. There are a shitload of scans and sanity checks happening when you push a package to a Maven repo such as Sonatype, which I don’t see as much with NPM (and also Pypi for that matter)
(fwiw, I am responsible for package distribution of all APIs of a reasonably popular timeseries database)
- krinchan 4y agoMost of these package systems being attacked run arbitrary code on your system when you install the package in order to allow native extensions to compile. Maven/Java simply downloads a (relatively) inert zip archive that your IDE might do some static analysis on to provide autocomplete. Along with all the scanning and what not, I think that’s the biggest reason you see attacks primarily on npm, PyPi, and to an extent Ruby Gems.