SAN FRANCISCO, CA - In the wake of a devastating supply chain attack in the npm registry that left millions of enterprise applications compromised and billions of user records exposed, developers across the JavaScript ecosystem expressed deep sorrow today, lamenting that such a crisis was completely unavoidable. “It’s a shame, but what can you do? This is just the price of building modern web apps,” said Senior Frontend Engineer Mark Vance, echoing the sentiments of a community that completely relies on a 40-level-deep nested tree of unvetted packages maintained by pseudonymous strangers to capitalize a single string. “There’s absolutely no way to foresee or prevent someone from taking over a long-abandoned utility package and injecting a crypto-miner into every production build in the world. It’s just an act of nature.”
  • Technus@lemmy.zip
    15·
    3 hours ago

    Interestingly, developers in ecosystems like Go, Rust, and those utilizing native Web APIs—where robust standard libraries drastically reduce reliance on third-party code and strict cryptographic verification is built into the core toolchain—reported zero instances of a college dropout’s weekend project wiping out global logistics infrastructure today.

    As someone who’s built a career in Rust, it is 100% susceptible to an attack like this. The community is just generally paranoid enough to avoid depending on super niche packages.

    Even so, Cargo still doesn’t have code signing and crates.io doesn’t have 2FA. They just barely rolled out email alerts for new crates being published with your API key.

    And there’s dozens of single-author crates that are depended upon by millions of lines of code, any one of which could easily be a vector in a supply chain attack. In fact there have been attempted supply chain attacks against crates.io, but to my knowledge they’ve all relied on typo-squatting.

    We’re definitely overdue for a major attack.

    • iocase@lemmy.zip
      1·
      32 minutes ago

      I guess one benefit is rust development often doesn’t use bleeding edge version for everything, where you pull the entirety of crates.io through your machine when you open your IDE. From what I’ve seen most projects use == versions and lock files.

      I don’t know enough about rust though. Could an attacker change historical crate versions to a payload and then cargo pulls them because they changed? Or will cargo only pull an update if you change to a different version on your machine?

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
        1·
        23 seconds ago

        That sounds better and worse. An attack could persist past one specific version without anyone noticing for a bit.

      • Technus@lemmy.zip
        1·
        15 minutes ago

        You can’t overwrite previously published versions.

        Application projects are recommended to check-in the Cargo.lock which pins dependency versions but you can always just run cargo update at any time which automatically upgrades all dependencies to the newest version allowed by the Cargo.toml.

        Some projects get around this by pinning the dependency in the Cargo.toml (using =) or by vendoring all their dependencies, which is a huge pain in the ass.