LavaMoat VS vue-cli

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

Immerse yourself in the official Vue CLI documentation for a deeper understanding.

Security would be a useful benefit/section to add to this post:

A.) If maintainers of your dependencies edited an existing version.

B.) If your dependencies did not pin their dependencies.

For instance, if you installed vue-cli in May of last year from NPM with --prefer-offline (basically the same as checking in your node_modules), you were fine. But because vue-cli doesn't pin its dependencies ("node-ipc"), installing fresh/online would create WITH-LOVE-FROM-AMERICA.txt on your desktop [1], which was at the very least a scare, but for some, very problematic.

[1] https://github.com/vuejs/vue-cli/issues/7054

Vue CLI documentation: https://cli.vuejs.org/

An interesting fact is that this dependency was used in vue-cli.

Vue CLI 3

Open issue for half a year https://github.com/vuejs/vue-cli/issues/7234

Vue CLI (command-line interface), which is used to install and create the main Vue framework libraries and third-party plugins.

Is there a reason you've used the old Vue CLI though, with webpack and babel?Imho you're missing a lot not using Vite... npm init vue@latest (create-vue) is the recommended way to scaffold a new Vue app, Vue CLI is in Maintenance Mode

The official Vue CLI UI is made with Vue + Apollo GraphQL. You'll know it when you run vue ui in your terminal. - https://github.com/vuejs/vue-cli/tree/dev/packages/%40vue/cli-ui

Both Vue.js and React have their own set of tools and libraries to help developers build and maintain their applications. Vue.js has Vue CLI and Nuxt.js, while React has Create React App and Next.js.