GHSA-pjwm-rvh2-c87w VS vouch

The SUNSPOT malware, Codecov breach, and lot of compromised open-source packages (like was the case with ua-parser-js) target the CI/ CD pipeline to modify release build or exfiltrate credentials.

I think you are misunderstanding the attack vector in the article you linked. This isn't the same thing we were discussing, please see https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-pjwm-rvh2-c87w. This was not a compromise designed to go after the visitors of the website so far as I can tell (and even if it were, it couldn't do much except possibly steal a password if you entered it on a compromised site or steal cookie data). This was designed to target people who were using the library in their software, aka, it was targeting the build-chain of the developers, and many devs and companies as a result had computers compromised when the updated their versions, which caused the compromised version to download to their computers.

Github has published an advisory for the package https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-pjwm-rvh2-c87w

If you don't know the author, signatures do nothing. Anybody can sign their package with some key. Even if you could check the author's identity, that still does very little for you, unless you know them personally.

It makes a lot more sense to use cryptography to verify that releases are not malicious directly. Tools like crev [1], vouch [2], and cargo-vet [3] allow you to trust your colleagues or specific people to review packages before you install them. That way you don't have to trust their authors or package repositories at all.

That seems like a much more viable path forward than expecting package repositories to audit packages or trying to assign trust onto random developers.

[1]: https://github.com/crev-dev/crev [2]: https://github.com/vouch-dev/vouch [3]: https://github.com/mozilla/cargo-vet

Alternatives to cargo-vet that has been mentioned before here on HN:

- https://github.com/crev-dev/crev

- https://github.com/vouch-dev/vouch

Anyone know of any more alternatives or similar tools already available?

I've created Vouch in an attempt to address this problem:

https://github.com/vouch-dev/vouch

Vouch lets users create and share reviews for NPM packages. Project dependencies can then be checked against those reviews.

Vouch uses extensions to interface with package ecosystems. It's simple to create a new extension. Extensions currently exist for NPM, PyPi, and Ansible Galaxy.

I'm currently working on a website to index known reviews and publish official reviews.

I hope you guys find it useful! Drop by the Matrix channel if you have any feedback to share: #vouch:matrix.org