4 ms·
Yeah, NPM should be enforcing 2FA and likely phishing resistant 2FA for some packages/ this should be a real control, issuing public audit events for email addr
by staticassertion 6mo ago
Yeah, NPM should be enforcing 2FA and likely phishing resistant 2FA for some packages/ this should be a real control, issuing public audit events for email address changes, and publish events should include information how it was published (trusted publishing, manual publish, etc).
- erikerikson 6mo agoInstead they took away TOTP as a factor. Scaling security with the popularity of a repo does seem like a good idea.
- mayhemducks 6mo agoAre there downsides to doing this? This was my first thought - though I also recognize that first thoughts are often naive.
- staticassertion 6mo agoYou don't want "project had X users so it's less safe" to suddenly transition into "now this software has X*10 users so it has to change things", it's disruptive.
- erikerikson 6mo agoTOTP although venerable was better than no second factor at all.
- moebrowne 6mo agoTOTP isn't phishing resistant
- erikerikson 6mo agoNo it's not but it's better than nothing. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
- staticassertion 6mo agoIt's not much better than nothing. It basically solves "I reused my password across sites" exclusively, that's it. If you're going to go through the effort of TOTP, it seems odd that you wouldn't just use a unique password. If you use a unique password it's questionable if it adds any value at all. Perhaps in very niche situations like "password authentication is itself vulnerable due to a timing attack/ bug" or some such thing... but we've rarely seen that in the wild.
- erikerikson 6mo agoI disagree. I use a password manager and systemically use long random passwords. An attacker would need to compromise my password manager, phish me, wrench me, or compromise the site the credential is associated with to get that. Using local only TOTP (no cloud storage or portability for me, by choice) they would have to additionally phish me, wrench me, compromise my phone, or compromise my physical security to get the code. None of these are easy except the wrench which is high risk. My password manager had standard features which make me more phishing resistant, and together they are more challenging than either apart. For example the fact that my password manager will not fill in the password on a non associated site means I am much less likely to fill in a TOTP code on an inappropriate site. Though there are vulnerable scenarios they aren't statistically relevant in the wild and the bar is higher regardless. Now I happen to have a FIDO key which I use for my higher security contexts but I'm a fairly low value target and npm isn't one of my high security contexts. TOTP improves my security stance generally and removing it from npmjs.org weakened my security stance there.
- staticassertion 6mo agoI'm confused. All an attacker has to do is phish you to get your password and TOTP. TOTP would cover cases like a compromised password manager or a reused password. That's it, right?
- erikerikson 6mo ago
- staticassertion 6mo agoTOTP seems effectively useless for npm so that seems fine to me
- efilife 6mo agohttps://docs.npmjs.com/configuring-two-factor-authentication https://docs.npmjs.com/configuring-two-factor-authentication > Important: Publishing to npm requires either: Two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled on your account, OR A granular access token with bypass 2FA enabled
- staticassertion 6mo agoI'm assuming the author must have been grandfathered in to TOTP?