crev VS birdcage

In other cases it may be more documented, such as Golangs baked-in telemetry.

There should be better ways to check these problems. The best I have found so far is Crev https://github.com/crev-dev/crev/. It's most used implementation is Cargo-crev https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev, but hopefully it will become more required to use these types of tools. Certainty and metrics about how many eyes have been on a particular script, and what expertise they have would be a huge win for software.

Looks like there's an implementation of it for npm: https://github.com/crev-dev/crev

I've been willing to try it for a while for Rust projects but never committed to spend the time. Any feedback?

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

I don't think it makes much sense to verify pypi authors. I mean you could verify corporations and universities and that would get you far, but most of the packages you use are maintained by random people who signed up with a random email address.

I think it makes more sense to verify individual releases. There are tools in that space like crev [1], vouch [2], and cargo-vet [3] that facilitate this, allowing you to trust your colleagues or specific people rather than the package authors. This seems like a much more viable solution to scale trust.

[1]: https://github.com/crev-dev/crev

Crev?

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 plug this every time, but here goes: https://github.com/crev-dev/crev solves this by providing code reviews, scales via a web-of-trust model, and relies on cryptographic identities. That way, you can depend on a package without having to trust its maintainers and all future versions.

I understand your worries about the number of dependencies you're "forced" to use, however, most of them tend to be doing something that's both non-trivial and useful for more than a single project. As for being able to trust all your transitive dependencies, well, that's something that the Crev project is trying to address, although I don't believe that has gained much traction yet.

It's good that having a reproducible build process is a requirement for the Gold rating, as is signed releases.

Perhaps there needs to be a Platinum level which involves storing the hash of each release in a distributed append-only log, with multiple third parties vouching that they can build the binary from the published source.

Obviously I'm thinking of something like sigstore[0] which the Arch Linux package ecosystem is being experimentally integrated with.[1] Then there's Crev for distributed code review.[2]

[0] https://docs.sigstore.dev/

[1] https://github.com/kpcyrd/pacman-bintrans

[2] https://github.com/crev-dev/crev

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!