LavaMoat VS lockfile-lint

Just yesterday I watched a talk [0] at WarsawJS about LavaMoat [1], a set of tools to protect against malicious behaviour from npm dependencies. Guess it’s time to look into it deeper.

[0]: https://naugtur.pl/pres3/lava/2023end.html

[1]: https://github.com/LavaMoat/LavaMoat

You are basically talking about Lavamoat. It provides tooling and policies for SES, which aims to make it into standards.

https://github.com/LavaMoat/LavaMoat

Enter: lavamoat. https://github.com/LavaMoat/LavaMoat

You should check out Lavamoat: https://github.com/LavaMoat/LavaMoat

It attempts to do what you're essentially describing. It was built by the MetaMask team, where supply chain attacks are an obviously huge risk.

I've spent some time trying to get it working in an app, but haven't been able to get it all the way working. It's still pretty beta and not well documented.

And it is happening right now. Github is opening the GitHub Advisory Database to community submissions. Awesome community NodeSecure builds cool things like scanner and js-x-ray. There are also lockfile-lint, LavaMoat, Jfrog-npm-tools (and I am sure there is more).

There is a proposal to add OCAPs on a language level in TC39[0]. There is already a drop-in implementation which already works in both Nodejs and browsers[1].

As a developer who wants to sandbox your own (recursive) dependencies, this is made accessible today in Lavamoat[2]. Basically a package or app can provide a policy manifest specifying which capabilities (e.g. network or filesystem access) should be granted for each dependency. Also comes with a tool that will auto-generate a starting point from your existing dependency tree.

IMO this is the future. Currently it does come with a performance penalty but hopefully this idea will catch on and make it into runtime implementations.

Lavamoat is still marked as "preprod" on npm but talking to the author it's a matter of days or weeks until the first stable release.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30703817

[1]: https://github.com/endojs/endo/tree/master/packages/ses

[2]: https://github.com/LavaMoat/LavaMoat

Run static analysis e.g. lint with lockfile-lint, Stylelint, ESLint, check for unimported files using unimported, and identify potential security vulnerabilities

I built a lockfile-lint (https://github.com/lirantal/lockfile-lint) that helps with ensuring that some of these trust policies are enforced.

And it is happening right now. Github is opening the GitHub Advisory Database to community submissions. Awesome community NodeSecure builds cool things like scanner and js-x-ray. There are also lockfile-lint, LavaMoat, Jfrog-npm-tools (and I am sure there is more).

An additional approach may be to use lockfile-lint, but you shouldn't just rely on this script entirely because there are other ecosystems than npm, and they may have similar issues.

Use lockfile lint to check changes in the package-lock.json which is typically not reviewed