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Disrupting supply chain attacks on NPM and GitHub Actions
- DiabloD3 2mo ago[flagged]
- rho138 2mo ago> Opting out of toxic ecosystems is a valid option Quick, everyone break out the pitchforks for a valid analysis of a game! /s
- theF00l 2mo agoThe job can require you to
- DiabloD3 2mo ago[flagged]
- x86a 2mo agoThis is such a myopic take
- baby_souffle 2mo agoGitHub actions doesn’t really make you a js shop
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 2mo agoThese comments should be removed r from HN, because they in no way actually add to the conversation. They aren’t intelligent, they aren’t insightful, they aren’t actionable, and they don’t invite a genuine reply. All you’re saying is that you happen to not use these technologies yourself – something that I’m sure is only by happenstance – and that you feel superior for it. This is a blog post by GitHub. what are you suggesting that these employees do? Simply ignore that they exist? Regardless of whether or not you use them, they still exist.
- anon48293 2mo ago> This is a blog post by GitHub. what are you suggesting that these employees do? Simply ignore that they exist? The buggy, insecure feature that is GitHub actions? Yes, preferably so.
- sieabahlpark 2mo ago[dead]
- DiabloD3 2mo agoIt very much is actionable. You might not know this, but the world of software development existed before NPM and Github, and it continues to exist after them. You are not beholden to either of them.
- pluto_modadic 2mo agothe bare minimum award, for the only language and only registry where this regularly happens.
- hinkley 2mo agoAt this rate I'm going to have "npm is by far the worst thing about NodeJS" printed on my gravestone.
- TacticalCoder 2mo ago> "npm is by far the worst thing about NodeJS" I'll come and add: "after JavaScript".
- hinkley 2mo agoThat's the cover charge. It's like showing up at a karaoke bar and then complaining about all the drunken covers being terrible.
- alpineman 2mo ago>> high-impact npm accounts are now put into a read-only mode for 72 hours when they change their email or use a 2FA recovery code. This delay allows maintainers time to respond and recover the account before their account can be used to start an attack. 'what time shall we put here?' 'what's the longest hangover you ever had?' 'let's put 72 hours'
- Waterluvian 2mo agoA weekend plus a day to deal with things seems like a decent minimum duration when it’s somewhat arbitrary what the right number is.
- datakan 2mo agoI don't think so at all. People go on vacation all the time. This should be 30 days not 3.
- Waterluvian 2mo agoThat's the usual runaway problem, right? Why not 60 then? People go on sabbaticals! etc etc. I feel like the only way to be wrong for this class of problem is to believe that there's a singular right answer. Just pick something reasonable (like how weekends are a fairly common thing, so don't make it shorter than 48 hours). Start there, then see how much of an issue persists. No matter what, at scale you'll find someone complaining that the number is too little, and people complaining that it's too much. Eventually you just have to tell the complainers to deal with it.
- datakan 2mo agoThere is a big difference between 3 days when someone may be sick or traveling and not looking and 30 which aligns better with 99% of scenarios this may be an issue with. 3 days is absurd. Even password apps with kill switches will default to 7 days. Cyber attacks will frequently happen on a Friday just for this scenario, they anticipate no ones looking over the weekend.
- hncsiocp9x 2mo ago[dead]
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- summarybot 2mo agoGithub owns NPM. Github has unprecedented access to code analysis tools. Github can run static analysis on nearly everything. Introducing a cooldown period seems like the lowest tech solution to a technological problem I have seen in a longwhile.
- insanitybit 2mo agoCooldowns have the benefit of being straightforward. It doesn't rely on updating rules, scanning, keeping up with obfuscation techniques, etc. It just stops installs for a period of time after publish. I think that cooldowns are mostly dumb but they're very cheap to deploy and they do give other approaches (like scanners) more time to adapt/ do their job.
- summarybot 2mo agoIn my opinion, things like scanners should not need to exist if npm's parent company, GitHub, were to take responsibility for what was published to npm. If Walmart sells you an item that ends up being a handgrenade there would be hell to pay. In this example, Walmart cannot simply say that Walmart is not in charge of what goes into the item and therefore "buyer beware." Yet, this is precisely what GitHub does with every npm package. One reasonable approach is to increase the scrutiny for new releases based on how many active downloads of the package there are. So for new packages, maybe there will be not a ton of scrutiny, but for things that are downloaded by millions of users, like Axios, there would be significantly more scrutiny per release. The epidemic of "not my job" and "[we] don't get paid to do that" is a large contributor to why the world is so messed up. I don't know what to call this phenomenon. In the Hawaiian language there is a word Kuleana which means "sacred responsibility" or "sacred task." If more people took on their Kuleana joyfully we would be inviting the ideal [realm] more rapidly.
- insanitybit 2mo agoWalmart and Github are so different. Walmart doesn't let anyone come in and set up a booth to sell things, Github does. Thinking that Github should take responsibility for what's hosted on it is... well, radical, to say the least. What you're suggesting is a radical departure from how free software has been distributed historically. That goes well beyond Github and NPM.
- skipants 2mo agoOne thing I don't quite get is how trusted publishing is supposed to be more secure. It still allows publishing if they pwn your workflow. Is it purely more secure because they can't exfiltrate your secret keys to publish again? I feel like if your workflow gets pwned you'd be rotating your keys anyways, so I'm not sure if the vendor lock-in is worth it.
- flyingshelf 2mo agoKeys can be reused from anywhere. Trusted publishing means the attacker must trigger the specific workflow on GitHub, which is more difficult and leaves trace of actions on GitHub itself.
- pimterry 2mo agoTrusted staged publishing helps a lot: you have to independently pwn the workflow _and_ then complete a separate 2FA flow as a maintainer. The workflow never sees any keys that can publish independently.
- insanitybit 2mo agoTrusted Publishing pins the publish to the workflow. The next step is to isolate "run untrusted code (`npm build`)" from "publish" in your workflows. Now you have two properties - the publish can only happen from one place and the publish is isolated from untrusted code execution.
- torment-nexus 2mo ago[flagged]
- MSkill1 2mo agoI literally am reading this after setting GitHub actions five minutes ago to generate the APK version of my cross platform project for the first time. Great :\
- Rumudiez 2mo ago[dead]
- effnorwood 2mo agoHey Siri, what is a local repo?
- zzo38computer 2mo agoMy only use of GitHub Actions specifies permissions that only allow it to write to the issue tracker, so if the program it executes (which is the "gh" program) is malicious then the only damage it can cause is to the issue tracker and not to the repository itself (unless GitHub Actions itself is compromised). Furthermore, there are no private files (I do not host private files on remote services such as GitHub), so they can't steal my files either. I think one thing that would help is to support mutual TLS, with X.509 certificate chains for authentication. This is more secure than personal access tokens and allows you to issue them to yourself and others without needing to login first, including to specify whatever permissions you want to set (as a subset of the permissions of the issuer) and to make them expire. (You could also store the private keys of one certificate on a separate computer not connected to the internet, and use that to issue another one to yourself to use that one instead, and can use a passworded private key as well (an alternative of 2FA), so you can recover even if your certificate you are using does become compromised, or something deletes it (intentionally or not), and can revoke the ones that are compromised.) Mutual TLS (and even ordinary TLS) won't solve everything, but in combination with other things, including ability to restrict access to what is needed, and avoiding needing too many dependencies (since, programs that need too many dependencies is also one thing that can cause many problems), and many other things, it can be an additional step to help with security.
- acdha 2mo ago> I think one thing that would help is to support mutual TLS, with X.509 certificate chains for authentication. This is more secure than personal access tokens This adds an large amount of overhead and complexity (i.e. you now need to manage a revocation list) but you didn’t really explain any benefit which isn’t already present except for the possibility of restricting access to the private key. That can have some benefits — e.g. it’d be nice if you could say that releases can only be signed by a particular key stored on a Yubikey with a physical presence check – but I think most of the benefits come not from using x.509 but rather from fine-grained permissions. Most of the attacks we’re seeing are escalation from an initial minor compromise where an attacker compromised something which had far greater permissions than needed for the task the attacker first exploited, as well as the broken design of GitHub Actions with mutable tags. I don’t think TLS gives us enough to take effort away from working on those.
- lrvick 2mo agoIt is fascinating how far people will go to do anything else at all other than having authors cryptographically sign their packages like every Linux package manager that matters since 1996. Linux package managers like debian/apt also ship hundreds of signed NPM packages. In other words the unpaid Linux community has once again solved a problem Microsoft fundamentally failed to. Some things never change.
- acdha 2mo agoWhat keeps Linux distributions safer is that fewer people are able to push updates and there’s a time delay. The compromises are because people exploit release pipelines and if your build infrastructure is compromised it’ll merrily sign the compromised packages as well.
- lrvick 2mo agoWhich is why automated signatures in release pipelines are usually meaningless. Authors must sign their code on their own hardware before it is published so we can tell when the signing key changes and pay extra special attention to that, and maybe a longer delay.
- receiptincar 2mo ago[dead]