HN Reader

> A while ago, I collaborated on angulartics2, a shared repository where multiple people still had admin rights. That repo still contained a GitHub Actions secret — a npm token with broad publish rights. This collaborator had access to projects with other people which I believe explains some of the other 40 initial packages that were affected.

> A new Shai-Hulud branch was force pushed to angulartics2 with a malicious github action workflow by a collaborator. The workflow ran immediately on push (did not need review since the collaborator is an admin) and stole the npm token. With the stolen token, the attacker published malicious versions of 20 packages. Many of which are not widely used, however the @ctrl/tinycolor package is downloaded about 2 million times a week.

I still don't get it. An admin on angulartics2 gets hacked, his Github access is used to push a malicious workflow that extracts an npm token. But why would an npm token in angulartics2 have publication rights to tinycolor?

> That repo still contained a GitHub Actions secret — a npm token with broad publish rights.

One of the advantages of Trusted Publishing [0] is that we no longer need long-lived tokens with publish rights. Instead, tokens are generated on the CI VM and are valid for only 15 minutes.

This has already been implemented in several ecosystems (PyPI, npm, Cargo, Homebrew), and I encourage everyone to use it, it actually makes publishing a bit _easier_.

More importantly, if the documentation around this still feels unclear, don’t hesitate to ask for help. Ecosystem maintainers are usually eager to see wider adoption of this feature.

[0] https://docs.pypi.org/trusted-publishers/

I think the point around incorporating MFA into the automated publishing flow isn't getting enough attention.

I've got no problem with doing an MFA prompt to confirm publish by a CI workflow - but last I looked this was a convoluted process of opening a https tunnel out (using a third party solution) such that you could provide the code.

I'd love to see either npm or GitHub provide an easy, out the box way, for me to provide/confirm a code during CI.

For the last 10 years I've been advocating for manual releases.

I've encountered a lot of backlash, but is it really that alien concept these days? CI/CD is cool, but between this and recent CF drama it seems we have a pretty solid evidence it can lead to a serious problems.

I worked at a BigBank once where deployments to production required at least five people present at a time and a lot of theatrics, but at least we knew what we were deploying.

Anyone know of a published tool/script to check for the existence of any of the vulnerable npm packages? I don't see anything like that in the stepsecurity page.

if the ci job force pushed something deep in the git history tree?

> exfiltrated a npm token with broad publish rights

I freaking HATE tokens. I hate them.

There should be a better way to do authentication than a glorified static password.

An example of how to do it correctly: Github as a token provider for AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/use-iam-roles-to-conne... But this is an exception, rather than a rule.

Two-factor auth for publishing is helpful, but requiring cryptographically signed approval by multiple authors would be more helpful. Then compromising a single author wouldn't be enough.

> Local 2FA based publishing isn’t sustainable...

Why is local 2FA unsustainable?! The real problem here is automated publishing workflows. The overwhelming majority of NPM packages do not publish often enough or have complicated enough release steps to justify tokens with the power to publish without human intervention.

What is so fucking difficult about running `npm publish` manually with 2FA? If maintainers are unwilling to do this for their packages, they should reconsider the number of packages they maintain.

Something somewhere needs to change because the status quo just isn't working. Yes, we can cheer on the benefit of OIDC tokens and zero-trust solutions in CI pipelines on HN all we want, but the fact is there's a significant number of library developers out there with millions of package downloads per week that will refuse to do anything about security until they're compromised or npm blocks them from publishing until they do.

And then there's other non-sensical proposals like spelunking deep into projects some which could be over a decade old and just rip out all the dependencies until there's nothing but a standard library is left. Look, I'm all for a better std lib, I think reducing the number of dependencies we have is good. But just saying "you should reduce dependencies" will do nothing concrete to fix the problem which already exists, because it's much easier said than done.

So either tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of developers stop using npm, and everyone refactors their projects to add more code and strip dependencies, or npm starts enforcing things like 2FA and OIDC for package developers with over X number of weekly downloads, and blocks publishing for those that don't follow the new security rules. I think it's clear which solution is more practical to implement. The only other option is for npm to completely lose its reputation and then we wind up with XKCD 927 again.