ua-parser-js VS cargo-crev

Just look at all the big companies doing it

https://faisalman.github.io/ua-parser-js/

This project is backed under MIT License, special shout out to project UA-Parser, as liguard uses a piece of its source-code.

With NPM, what's actually published is not what's in the git repo, so it's harder to inspect/review vulnerabilities or hijacking. With composer, what's in git _is_ what composer pulls (with the exception of rules in .gitattributes to exclude files etc), making it much easier to trace. One such example: https://github.com/faisalman/ua-parser-js/issues/536

Composer packages are vendor namespaced, so hijacking an abandoned package is not possible (and it is with NPM), some examples like https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/10/github_npm_package/

Sure, I suppose in theory it could happen with other ecosystems, but for some reason it doesn't. It sure seems to just keep happening in NPM though.

From the other side, npm package may be hijacked(as it happened recently for ua-parser-js and to other packages earlier). To mitigate that, I don't know, probably, subscribing to some security digest would be the most helpful.

On Oct. 22, 2021, developers of a very common NPM package, ua-parser-js, discovered that some attackers uploaded a compromised version of the package containing malware for Linux and Windows, and were capable of stealing data (at least passwords and cookies from the browser).

Since Neovim 0.5 release (which has full Lua support) I see more and more amazing Lua plugins being developed, and I think this trend will likely to continue. But I recently got more concerned about security risks associated with the way Neovim plugins being installed and used (especially after seeing recent compromises like ua-parser-js or coa). Installing typical Neovim plugin is basically downloading and executing random code from the internet on your machine with your user privileges, so hijacked or deliberately malicious plugin could potentially do a lot of damage (like stealing keys/passwords, installing keylogger or just rm -rf / for fun).

thread about compromise https://github.com/faisalman/ua-parser-js/issues/536

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.

The main problem the author is talking about is actually about version updates, which in Maven as well as crates.io is up to each lib's author, and is not curated in any way.

There's no technical solution to that, really. Do you think Nexus Firewall can pick up every exploit, or even most? How confident of that are you, and what data do you have to back that up? I don't have any myself, but would not be surprised at all if "hackers" can easily work around their scanning.

However, I don't have a better approach than using scanning tools like Nexus, or as the author proposes, use a curated library repository like Debian is doing (which hopefully gets enough eyeballs to remain secure) or the https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev project (manually reviewed code) also mentioned. It's interesting that they mention C/C++ just rely on distros providing dynamic libs instead which means you don't even control your dependencies versions, some distro does (how reliable is the distro?)... I wonder if that could work for other languages or if it's just as painful as it looks in the C world.

For instance, the worst company imaginable may be in charge of software that was once FOSS, and they may change absolutely nothing about it, so it should be fine. However, if a small update is added that does something bad, you should know about it immediately.

The solution seems to be much more clearly in the realm of things like crev: https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev/

Wherein users can get a clear picture of what dependencies are used in the full chain, and how they have been independently reviewed for security and privacy. That's the real solution for the future. A quick score that is available upon display everytime you upgrade, with large warnings for anything above a certain threshold.

The metrics on crates.io are a useful sniff test, but ultimately you need to review things yourself, or trust some contributors and reviewers. Some projects, like cargo crev or cargo vet can help with the process.

You can use cargo-geiger or cargo-crev to check for whether people you trusted (e.g. u/jonhoo ) trust this crate.

There is a similar idea being explored with https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev - you trust a reviewer who reviews crates for trustworthiness, as well as other reviewers.

[cargo-crev](https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev) looks like a good step in the right direction but not really commonly used.

'cargo crev' makes this kind of workflow possible: https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev

The crev folks themselves are no fans of PGP but need a way to security identify that you are in fact the review author, so that's where the id generation comes in. Ultimately crev is just a bunch of repos with text files you sign with IDs. The nice property is that you can chain these together into a web of trust and it's unfortunate that vet doesn't just use the same signed files on repos model as a foundation because even if they don't trust anyone else, we could turn around and trust them.