wapm-cli VS birdcage

To actually compile this we can use a tool called WABT (WebAssembly Binary Toolkit). It's basically a mess that requires CMake and I couldn't get it to run on WSL and I wasn't going to install MinGW. Instead there's a nice tool called WAPM from Wasmer which works like npm for webassembly packages and since it's been compiled down to webassembly we can run it in any environment. In fact we don't even need to add configuration so long as wapm is installed. We can run wax wat2wasm -- wat/mat.wat -o wasm/mat.wasm. wax is like npx for npm. If you're wondering the command we give wax is defined by the wasmer/wabt package: https://wapm.io/wasmer/wabt. Also for some reason you can't prefix local paths with ./ so wax wat2wasm -- ./wat/mat.wat doesn't work which tool me a while to figure out. Anyway this provides a nice simple compile environment if you want to work on raw WAT files.

That's the main reason we should start using WebAssembly for distributing and using packages.

Shamless plug: Wasmer [1] and WAPM [2] could help a lot on this quest!

[1]: https://wasmer.io/

[2]: https://wapm.io/

There's WAPM

If it's buildable for the WebAssembly WASI target, consider also distributing it through WAPM.

I don't know if many people have heard of it, but there's actually a WebAssembly Package Manager. It's similar to crates.io, except you upload WebAssembly binaries written in any language instead of Rust source code!

You can see this paying off with wapm, which lets you download applications that would have normally required compilation for your environment and run them anywhere with a supported runtime, which is imo pretty neat.

One step closer to the day when I can put actix-web creations up on WAPM so "Just type wax my-cool-thing to try it out" can be one of the distribution options.

I've added limited support to run wapm.io directly from the Terminal. Examples of commands that work well are wapm cowsay {Text} and wapm uuid.

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!