js-x-ray VS registry

If you are new in town, JS-X-Ray is an open source JavaScript SAST (Static Application Security Testing). The tool analyzes your JavaScript sources for patterns that may affect the security and quality of your project 😎.

@nodesecure/js-x-ray, a SAST scanner (A static analyser for detecting most common malicious patterns)

I'm back at writing for a new technical article on NodeSecure. This time I want to focus on the SAST JS-X-Ray 🔬.

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).

Static Analysis is powered by @nodesecure/js-x-ray and @nodesecure/scanner.

Execute NodeSecure/JS-X-Ray on each JavaScript files.

JS-X-Ray - SAST Scanner

I have been working every night of the week on a new major version of my open-source JavaScript SAST JS-X-Ray. I've been looking forward to making significant changes to the code for several months now...

More important than the namespace is who published the package. I'm more inclined to trust an individual I know who takes security than a namespace that may change hands.

NPM exposes that info in the _npmUser field: https://github.com/npm/registry/blob/master/docs/REGISTRY-AP.... That gives "name" (NPM username) and email.

While there are thousands of packages, I bet there's a much smaller number of publishers to worry about.

I can't find anything about it in their docs. https://github.com/npm/registry/blob/master/docs/REGISTRY-API.md

https://github.com/npm/registry/blob/master/docs/REGISTRY-API.md here are the docs. I was getting 122ms responses instead of 9000 on the old one.

My first instinct was to work with the public API of the npm registry. This sounds like a very good idea, but you will soon run into a set of problems (cache, private registry etc..).

There is no need to obtain an API key or token for querying NPM registry API. For the dashboard, I use only the endpoint that provides the data about a package downloads count - https://api.npmjs.org/downloads/. You can read more about it here.

While many people regularly use npm's website to discover packages, only a few know that npm also provides a public REST API accessible at registry.npmjs.org.

Or roll your own, docs here: https://github.com/npm/registry/blob/master/docs/download-counts.md