Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8317
The Node Package Manager (npm) team avoided a disaster today when it discovered and blocked the distribution of a cleverly hidden backdoor mechanism inside a popular —albeit deprecated— JavaScript package.
The actual backdoor mechanism was found in "getcookies," a relatively newly created npm package (JavaScript library) for working with browser cookies.
The npm team —who analyzed this package earlier today after reports from the npm community— says "getcookies" contains a complex system for receiving commands from a remote attacker, who could target any JavaScript app that had incorporated this library. The npm team explains:
The backdoor worked by parsing the user-supplied HTTP request.headers, looking for specifically formatted data that provides three different commands to the backdoor. [...] We can see here that the headers are stringified and the result searched for values in the format of: gCOMMANDhDATAi
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Thursday May 03 2018, @06:21PM (4 children)
So if I use two packages that rely on the same dependency at exactly the same version I need two copies of the dependency? That sounds efficient.
This is (part of) what versioning is for. I do think that it would be clever for our text files to optionally contain hashes of dependencies at their given versions, so that we can verify no meddling has taken place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03 2018, @07:17PM (1 child)
We have this already in the form of yarn.lock and package.lock files
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JNCF on Thursday May 03 2018, @07:52PM
Good to see that npm adopted yarn's lock files! I like their JSON layout with hashes separated from file locations more than the yarn way of storing that data. I considered bringing up yarn, but I was worried it might be a bit off-topic since we're discussing issues arising from public repos. Yarn can solve your issues, or my issues, but not our issues.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03 2018, @07:18PM (1 child)
You spelled secure wrong.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Thursday May 03 2018, @07:53PM
You ignored half my comment, or failed to read it.