ua-parser-js VS goggles.mozilla.org

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

> check out the Web X-Ray repo <https://github.com/mozilla/goggles.mozilla.org/>.

Thanks for example. Peeking a bit under the hood, it appears to be due to transitive dependencies referencing github urls (and transient ones at that) instead of semver, which admittedly is neither standard nor good practice...

FWIW, simply removing `"grunt-contrib-jshint": "~0.4.3",` from package.json and related jshint-related code from Gruntfile was sufficient to get `npm install` to complete successfully. The debugging just took me a few minutes grepping package-lock.json for the 404 URL in question (https://github.com/ariya/esprima/tarball/master) and tracing that back to a top-level dependency via recursively grepping for dependent packages. I imagine that upgrading relevant dependencies might also do the trick, seeing as jshint no longer depends on esprima[0].

I'm not sure how representative this particular case is to the sort of issues you run into, but I'll tell that reproducibility issues can get a lot worse in ways that committing deps doesn't help (for example, issues like this one[1] are nasty to narrow down).

But assuming that installation in your link just happens to have a simple fix and that others are not as forgiving, how is committing node_modules supposed to help here if you're saying you can't even get it to a working state in the first place? DO you own the repo in order to be able to make the change? Or are you mostly just saying that hindsight is 20-20?

[0] https://github.com/jshint/jshint/blob/master/package.json#L4...

[1] https://github.com/node-ffi-napi/node-ffi-napi/issues/143