birdcage VS npm

Co-funder @ Phylum here (https://phylum.io) We have been actively scanning dependencies across npm (and PyPI, RubyGems, Crates.io, etc.) for nearly three years now; quite successfully, I might add (https://blog.phylum.io/tag/research/). We _automatically_ hit on this package when it was published, and our research team has been all over it.

A collective of us are active in Discord (https://discord.gg/Fe6pr5eW6p), continuing to hunt attacks like these. If that's something that interests you, we'd love to have you!

In addition to this, we've released several open source tools to help protect against supply chain attacks:

1. https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage - Birdcage is a cross-platform embeddable sandbox that's been baked into our CLI (which wraps npm, pypi, etc.) to sandbox package installations

2. https://github.com/phylum-dev/cli - Our CLI provides an extension capability so you can lock down random executables you might use during your software development (define _what_ it's allowed to do, e.g. network access, and then lock it down with Birdcage)

We also have a variety of integrations, including Github, Gitlab, BitBucket, CircleCI, Tines, Sophos, etc.

https://docs.phylum.io/docs/integrations_overview

It's unfortunate that software dependency attacks continue to plague open source registries. It seems unlikely this will let up in the near future. We are continuing to work closely with the open source ecosystems to try and get these sorts of packages removed when they pop up.

To be clear, this particular package did not execute code during install, so the sandbox wouldn't have come into play, but it would have been blocked by the pre-check against Phylum's API.

Would greatly appreciate any feedback on our extensions and suggestions for improving our sandbox! We recently had a few individuals submit some great issues and suggestions, which we absolutely loved receiving.

Happy to answer any questions about software supply chain attacks or security in general!

1. https://blog.phylum.io/junes-sophisticated-npm-attack-attrib...

2. https://blog.phylum.io/rust-malware-staged-on-crates-io/

3. https://blog.phylum.io/npm-emails-validator-package-malware/

4. https://github.com/phylum-dev/cli

5. https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage

We're actively working on this with our sandbox (https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage). We've wrapped the likes of pip, yarn, and npm already and are making moves to similarly provide support for cargo.

Currently comes as part of the Phylum CLI (https://github.com/phylum-dev/cli), so that doing something like:

    phylum npm install 

We (https://phylum.io) actually open sourced our sandbox for this exact purpose.

https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage

It's baked into our CLI and supports limiting access to network, disk, etc. during package installation. For example, running something like

    phylum npm install react

We've open sourced our sandbox, which limits access to network/disk/etc. during package installation. In this way, nasty install scripts won't have the opportunity to ship your credentials/SSH keys off to a remote sever.

The sandbox is also open source and available for use by the community.

In addition to this, taking precautions to not install unknown packages is probably also extremely prudent. Towards that end, we've open sourced a cross platform embeddable sandbox for package installations. Source is freely available on Github (https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage) and we've added it into our tooling so you can run pip install ... and it'll limit access to disk, network, etc. during package installation.

Been working on this exact thing for nearly two years at https://www.phylum.io. We identified and reported about 1.2k packages in ecosystems like npm, pypi and others last year. GitHub app that checks your PRs for malware. We also built a free open source sandbox for package installations [1] so if malware does get executed it’s done in a locked down environment. Happy to chat further about this sort of thing, it’s something I’m wildly interested in!

[1] https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage

(Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders at Phylum)

Our system has been alerting us to this actor's activities all morning (beginning sometime last night). They have been wildly active, and have continued to publish packages as we've worked to get them removed.

Interestingly, they have ported the Python bits to Javascript and have started publishing to NPM as well. Exact same TTP, crossing two ecosystems.

Our platform monitors these ecosystems, scanning packages for signs of risk as they are published. This way we can get them removed before they impact the wider open source community. We currently support Javascript, Typescript, Python, Ruby, Java, C# and recently just rolled out Golang and Rust support into beta.

We believe in a defense in depth approach to supply chain security and have also published an open source sandbox that limits access to the filesystem, network, disk and environment variables.

https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage

This is rolled into our CLI so that you can do things like `phylum npm install ` and install packages in a sandboxed way.

Happy to answer questions about this attack, security, sandboxes, etc!

The fact that JSON doesn't support comments is so annoying, and I always thought that Douglas Crockford's rationale for this basically made no sense ("They can be misused!" - like, so what, nearly anything can be misused. So without support for comments e.g. in package.json files I have to do even worse hacky workaround bullshit like "__some_field_comment": "this is my comment"). There is of course jsonc and JSON5 but the fact that it's not supported everywhere means 10 years later we still can't write comments in package.json (there is https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/4482 and about a million related issues).

Things like the sparkline charts on npmjs (e.g. https://www.npmjs.com/package/npm ) are interactive SVGs. I think they're pretty common for data visualizations of all kinds

I actually did a POC 7 years ago about this - https://github.com/tanepiper/steal-ur-stuff

It was reported to npm at the time, but they chose to ignore it - https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/17724

Every time this pops up, I'm reminded of the day that the NPM registry started returning 418 responses.

I remember being at a training course that day and my manager asking me what we could do to fix it because our CI was failing to pull dependencies from NPM.

Trying to explain that NPM was returning a status code intended as an April Fools joke and which was never meant to see the light of production was quite difficult

https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/20791

I should really get around to how I discovered this 6 years ago and still nothing done about it

Whenever something like this comes up I usually have to tap the sign (and the original report)

NPM is not "Node Package Manager". https://www.npmjs.com/package/npm

> which can be overriden with env setting

Support for this is not great. Lots of packages still don't support this properly. My experience matches the 2015 comment https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/775#issuecomment-71294085

> Not sure why "symlinks" would be involved.

If you make your node_modules a symlink, multiple packages will fail. Even if you're not interested in doing that, others are.

> What NPM does is leaps and bounds ahead

Unless you change your node / gyp version. It doesn't really have a concept of runtime version. You can restrict it, but not have two concurrent versions if they conflict.

[email protected] was released in May 2017 and it seems to address many of the issues that Yarn aims to solve. Do keep an eye on it!

I think it's had been supposed to do that since forever. Apart from some bug in npm 5.3. Are you sure your package-lock versions actually conform to the semver ranges in your package.json?