This was always a nightmare waiting to happen. The sheer mass of packages and the consequent vast attack surface for supply chain attacks was always a problem that was eventually going to blow up in everyone's face.
But it was too convenient. Anyone warning about it or trying to limit the damage was shouted down by people who had no experience of any other way of doing things. "import antigravity" is just too easy to do without.
Well, now we're reaching the "find out" part of the process I guess.
I worked for one company where we were super conservative. Every external component was versioned. Nothing was updated without review and usually after it had plenty of soak time. Pretty much everything built from source code (compilers, kernel etc.). Builds [build servers/infra] can't reach the Internet at all and there's process around getting any change in. We reviewed all relevant CVEs as they came out to make a call on if they apply to us or not and how we mitigate or address them.
Then I moved to another company where we had builds that access the Internet. We upgrade things as soon as they come out. And people think this is good practice because we're getting the latest bug fixes. CVEs are reviewed by a security team.
Then a startup with a mix of other practices. Some very good. But we also had a big CVE debt. e.g. we had secure boots on our servers and encrypted drives. We had a pretty good grasp on securing components talking to each other etc.
Everyone seems to think they are doing the right thing. It's impossible to convince the "frequent upgrader" that maybe that's a risk in terms of introducing new issues. We as an industry could really use a better set of practices. Example #1 for me is better in terms of dependency management. In general company #1 had well established security practices and we had really secure products.
I would rather work with a company that updates continuously, while also building security into multiple layers so that weaknesses in one layer can be mitigated by others.
For example, at one company I worked for, they created an ACL model for applications that essentially enforced rules like: “Application X in namespace A can communicate with me.”
This ACL coordinated multiple technologies working together, including Kubernetes NetworkPolicies, Linkerd manifests with mTLS, and Entra ID application permissions. As a user, it was dead simple to use and abstracted away a lot of things i do not know that well.
The important part is not the specific implementation, but the mindset behind it.
An upgrade can both fix existing issues and introduce new ones. However, avoiding upgrades can create just as many problems — if not more — over time.
At the same time, I would argue that using software backed by a large community is even more important today, since bugs and vulnerabilities are more likely to receive attention, scrutiny, and timely fixes.
You forgot case #4: Worked at a startup where the frontend team thought it was a good idea to use lock files during development, but to do a "fresh" install of all dependecies during the deployment step.
And yes, they still thought they were doing the right thing.
To be fair npm makes (made?) it weirdly hard to use lock files so a lot of people did that by mistake. And when you do use lock, it reinstalls every time so a retagged package can just silently update.
I can’t comment on the behavior of ancient npm versions, but with modern npm I would not even know how to skip using a lockfile.
As for the parent comment about not using the lockfile for the production build, that’s just incredibly incompetent.
Maybe they should hire someone who knows what they are doing. Contrary to the popular beliefs of backend engineers online, you also need some competency to do frontend properly.
In this case what’s needed is „npm ci“ instead of „npm install“ or better „pnpm install —frozen-lockfile“.
Pnpm will also do that automatically if the CI environment variable is set.
> It's impossible to convince the "frequent upgrader" that maybe that's a risk in terms of introducing new issues
I would count myself as a "frequent upgrader" - I admin a bunch of Ubuntu machines and typically set them to auto-update each night. However, I am aware of the risks of introducing new issues, but that's offset by the risks of not upgrading when new bugs are found and patched. There's also the issue of organisations that fall far behind on versions of software which then creates an even bigger problem, though this is more common with Windows/proprietary software as you have less control over that. At least with Linux, you can generally find ways to install e.g. old versions of Java that may be required for specific tools.
There's no simple one-size-fits-all and it depends on the organisation's pool of skills as to whether it's better to proactively upgrade or to reluctantly upgrade at a slower pace. In my experience, the bugs introduced by new versions of software are easier to fix/workaround than the various issues of old software versions.
> Everyone seems to think they are doing the right thing
I like to think people would agree more on the appropriate method if they saw the risk as large enough.
If you could convince everyone that a nuclear bomb would get dropped on their heads (or a comparably devastating event) if a vulnerability gets in, I highly doubt a company like #2 would still believe they're doing things optimally, for example.
If you expose people to the true risks instead of allowing them to be ignorant, the conclusion that they might come to is that they shouldn’t develop software at all.
What part of "We reviewed all relevant CVEs as they came out to make a call on if they apply to us or not and how we mitigate or address them" gave you that impression?
So, to play Pandora, what if the net effect of uncovering all these unknown attack vectors is it actually empties the holsters of every national intelligence service around the world? Just an idea I have been playing with. Say it basically cleans up everything and everyone looking for exploits has to start from scratch except “scratch” is now a place where any useful piece of software has been fuzz tested, property tested and formally verified.
Assuming we survive the gap period where every country chucks what they still have at their worst enemies, I mean. I suppose we can always hit each other with animal bones.
TBH this is a pretty good way of looking at it. Yeah we're seeing an explosion of vulnerabilities being found right now, but that (hopefully) means those vulnerabilities are all being cleaned up and we're entering a more hardened era of software. Minus the software packages that are being intentionally put out as exploits, of course. Maybe some might say it's too optimistic and naive, but I think you have a good point.
The future may be distributed quite unevenly here, as they say, with a divergence between a small amount of "responsible" code in systems which leverage AI defensively, and a larger amount of vibe-coded / prompt-engineered code in systems which don't go through the extra trouble, and in fact create additional risk by cutting corners on human review. I personally know a lot of people using AI to create software faster, but none of them have created special security harnesses a la Mozilla (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/05/mozil...).
This is one force that operates. Another is that, in an effort to avoid depending on such a big attack surface, people are increasingly rolling their own code (with or without AI help) where they might previously have turned to an open source library.
I think the effect will generally be an increase in vulnerabilities, since the hand-rolled code hasn't had the same amount of time soaking in the real world as the equivalent OS library; there's no reason to assume the average author would magically create fewer bugs than the original OS library authors initially did. But the vulnerabilities will have much narrower scope: If you successfully exploit an OS library, you can hack a large fraction of all the code that uses it, while if you successfully exploit FooCorp's hand-rolled implementation, you can only hack FooCorp. This changes the economic incentive of funding vulnerabilities to exploit -- though less now than in the past, when you couldn't just point an LLM at your target and tell it "plz hack".
I’m seeing a lot of similar things during code reviews of substantially LLM-produced codebases now. Half-baked bad idea that probably leaked from training sets.
Typically when hand-rolling code you implement only what you require for your use-case, while a library will be more general purpose. As a consequence of doing more, have more code and more bugs.
Also, even seemingly trivial libraries can have bugs. The infamous leftpad library didn't handle certain edge doses properly.
For supply chain security and bug count, I'll take a focused custom implementation of specific features over a library full of generalized functionality.
Yes, a lot hinges on how little you can get away with implementing for your use case. If you have an XML config file with 3 settings in it, you probably won't need to implement handling of external entities the way a full XML parsing library would, which will close off an entire class of attendant vulnerabilities.
> Also, even seemingly trivial libraries can have bugs. The infamous leftpad library didn't handle certain edge doses properly.
This isn't really an argument in favour of having the average programmer reimplement stuff, though. For it to be, you'd have to argue that the leftpad author was unusually sloppy. That may be true in this specific case, but in general, I'm not persuaded that the average OSS author is worse than the average programmer overall. IMHO, contributing your work to an OSS ecosystem is already a mild signal of competence.
On the wider topic of reimplementation: Recently there was an article here about how the latest Ubuntu includes a bunch of coreutils binaries that have been rewritten in Rust. It turns out that, while this presumably reduced the number of memory corruption bugs (there was still one, somehow; I didn't dig into it), it introduced a bunch of new vulnerabilities, mostly caused by creating race conditions between checking a filesystem path and using the path for something.
ETA: I'm not saying it has to, I'm saying it's possible to imagine reasons that would justify this decision in some cases.
Because it might grow in future and you want to allow flexibility for that, because it might be the input to or output from some external system that requires XML, because your team might have standardised on always using XML config files, because introducing yet another custom plain text file format just creates unnecessary cognitive load for everyone who has to use it are real-world reasons I can think of.
But really I was just looking for a concrete example where I know the complexity of the implementation has definitely caused vulnerabilities, whether or not the choice to use it to solve the problem at hand was sensible. I have zero love for XML.
Do you have a specific library in mind? I think it would have to be an ancient, unmaintained C library.
But I think most OSS code isn't like this -- even C code born long ago, if it's still in wide use, has been hardened by now. Examples: Linux kernel, GNU userland, PostgreSQL, Python.
> even C code born long ago, if it's still in wide use, has been hardened by now. Examples: Linux kernel
There have been two LPE vulnerability and exploits in the Linux kernel announced today. After the one announced just last week. I don't think as much of the C code born long ago has been as carefully hardened as you think.
(Copy Fail 2 and Dirty Frag today, and Copy Fail last week)
Sure, I didn't mean to say that these examples are guaranteed 100% safe -- just that I trust them to be enormously more safe than software that accomplishes the same task that was hand-written by either a human or an an LLM last week.
You are avoiding intentionally to say ‘thanks to LLMs’ or is implicit? As all these recent mega bugs surface with lots of fuzzing and agentic bashing, right ?
Having casually read into a few recent incidents the vector has often been outside of software. A lot of mis-configurations or simply attacking the human in the chain. And nation states have basically unbounded resources for everything from bribes, insiders, and even standing up entire companies.
I think it will be an arms race in the future as well. Easier to fix known vulnerabilities automatically, but also easier to find new ones and the occasionally AI fuckup instead of the occasionally human fuckup.
Right now it kinda feels to me like "Open Source" is the Russian army, assuming their sheer numbers and their huge quantity of equipment much off which is decades old.
Meanwhile attackers and bug hunters are like the Ukrainians, using new, inexpensive, and surprisingly powerful tools that none of the Open Source community has ever seen in the past, and for which it has very little defence capability.
The attackers with cheap drones or LLMs are completely overwhelming the old school who perhaps didn't notice how quickly the world has changed around them, or did notice but cannot do anything about quickly enough.
Well this argument was certainly inventive.
What a weird impression to have about these things.
Who exactly is the innocent little Ukraine supposed to be that the big bad open source is supposed to be attacking to, what? take their land and make the OSS leader look powerful and successful at acheiving goals to distract from their fundamental awfulness? And who are the North Korean canon fodder purchased by OSS while we're at it?
Yeah it's just like that, practically the same situation. The authors of gnu cp and ls can't wait to get, idk, something apparently, out of the war they started when they attacked, idk, someone apparently.
New software is being generated faster than it can be adequately tested. We are in the same place we’ve always been; except everything is moving much too fast.
This is exactly the feeling I have. First: excessive growth of dependencies fueled by free components.
* with internet access to FOSS via sourceforge and github we got an abundance of building blocks
* with central repositories like CPAN, npm, pip, cargo and docker those building blocks became trivially easy to use
Then LLMs and agents added velocity to building apps and producing yet more components, feeding back into the dependency chain. Worse: new code with unattributed reuse of questionable patterns found in unknowable versions of existing libraries. That is, implicit dependencies on fragments multitude of packages.
This may all end well ultimately, but we're definitely in for a bumpy ride.
This assumes that there are no new exploits being generated.
We're seeing maintainers retreat from maintaining because the amount of AI slop being pushed at them is too much. How many are just going to hand over the maintenance burden to someone else, and how many of those new maintainers are going to be evil?
The essential problem is that our entire system of developing civilisation-critical software depends on the goodwill of a limited set of people to work for free and publish their work for everyone else to use. This was never sustainable, or even sensible, but because it was easy we based everything on it.
We need to solve the underlying problem: how to sustainably develop and maintain the software we need.
A large part of this is going to have to be: companies that use software to generate profits paying part of those profits towards the development and maintenance of that software. It just can't work any other way. How we do this is an open question that I have no answers for.
That is already how it works. The loner hacker in moms basement working for free on his super critical OSS package is largely a myth. The vast majority of OSS code is contributed by companies paying their employees to work on it.
this is a cornerstone of modern software development. If it died, or if got taken over by a malicious entity, every single company on the planet would have an immediate security problem. Yet the experience of that maintainer is bad verging on terrible [1].
>As an example, he put up a slide listing the 47 car brands that use curl in their products; he followed it with a slide listing the brands that contribute to curl. The second slide, needless to say, was empty.
>He emphasized that he has released curl under a free license, so there is no legal problem with what these companies are doing. But, he suggested, these companies might want to think a bit more about the future of the software they depend on.
There is little reason for minimal-restriction licenses to exist other than to allow corporate use without compensation or contribution. I would think by now that any hope that they would voluntarily be any less exploitative than they can would have been dashed.
If you aren't getting paid or working purely for your own benefit, use a protective license. Though, if thinly veiled license violation via LLM is allowed to stand, this won't be enough.
There is a lot of opposition in the FOSS community for restrictive/protective licenses. And to be fair, this comes from a consistent and entirely logical worldview.
There's a bunch of problems with getting companies to pay for this, too - that sense of entitlement (or even contractual obligation), the ability to control the project with cash, etc.
I don't have any answers or solutions. But I don't think we can hand-wave the problem away.
The problem is that they get away too easily with bugs in their products they ship to customers. If this would come with some penalties, there would be some incentive to invest in security and this would probably often flow back to upstream projects.
How so? We have open source operating systems running on a whole sleuth of systems ages apart. Interesting ideas and open collaboration coming out of the OS world.
This opposed to closed off “products” that change at the whims of the company owning it.
Statistically. Most of it is created to serve marketing, personal or other agenda needs and is sponsored through the corresponding means for it.
There’s a lot of misconception about how the open source comes to be and very small part, still significant of course, of it was really created for the benefit of a community. There are exceptions, but dig the organisational culture and origins and you’ll see the pattern. Also, thousands of projects are made for the satisfaction of the author himself being highly intelligent and high on algorithmic dopamine.
This is related to a massive annoyance of mine: when I run a piece of software and the system is missing a required dependency, I want the software to *tell me* that dependency is missing so I can make a decision about proceeding or not. Instead it seems that far too often software authors will try and be “clever” by silently installing a bunch of dependencies, either in some directory path specific to the software, or even worse globally.
I run a distro that often causes software like this to break because their silent automatic installation typically makes assumptions about Linux systems which don’t apply to mine. However I fear for the many users of most typical distros (and other OS’ in general as it’s not just a Linux-only issue) who are subject to having all sorts of stuff foisted onto their system with little to no opportunity to easily decide what is being heaped upon them.
Ruby gems and CPAN have build scripts that rebuild stuff on the user's device (and warn you if they can't find a dependency). But I believe one of the Python's tools that started the trend of downloading binaries instead of building them. Or was it NPM?
What we are seeing so far come out of the AI agent era is reduced not increased code quality. The few advances are by far negated by all the slop that's thrown around and that's unlikely to change.
> any useful piece of software has been fuzz tested, property tested and formally verified.
That would require effort. Human effort and extra token cost. Not going to happen, people want to rather move fast an break things.
My pet theory is that package managers will one day be seen like we see object-oriented programming today. As something that was once popular but that we've since grown out of. It's also a design flaw that I see in cargo/Rust. Having to import 3rd party packages with who-knows-what dependencies to do pretty much anything, from using async to parsing JSON, it's supply chain vulnerability baked into the language philosophy. npm is no better, but I'm mentioning Rust specifically because it's an otherwise security-conscious language.
The industry hasn't grown out of OOP. Go look at any major production codebase businesses rely on and it's fully of objects and classes, including new codebases made very recently.
Package managers aren't going anywhere. Even languages that historically bet on large standard libraries have been giving up on that over time (e.g. Java's stdlib comes with XML support but not JSON).
Unfortunately, LLMs are also not cheap enough to just create whole new PL ecosystems from scratch. So we have to focus on the lowest hanging fruits here. That means making sandboxing and containers far more available and easy for developers. Nobody should run "npm install" outside a sandbox.
A stdlib doesn't have to provide everything under the sun in order to be helpful here.
Languages with rich standard libraries provide enough common components that it's feasible to build things using only a small handful of external dependencies. Each of those can be carefully chosen, monitored, and potentially even audited, by an individual or small team.
That doesn't make the resulting software exploit-proof, of course, but it seems to me much less risky than an ecosystem where most programs pull in hundreds of dependencies, all of which receive far less scrutiny than a language's standard library.
I don't have an answer what the alternative is going to look like. But smarter people than me may find something. C/C++ are doing fine without package managers. Go at least has a more capable standard library than Rust. But I'm not sure if Go's import github approach is the answer.
One idea I've been entertaining is to not allow transitive imports in packages. It would probably lead to far fewer and more capable packages, and a bigger standard library. Much harder to imagine a left-pad incident in such an ecosystem.
> Go at least has a more capable standard library than Rust.
Many Golang projects I see in the wild will import a number of dependencies with significant feature overlap with sections of the standard library, or even be intended as a replacement for them. So it seems that having an expansive stdlib isn’t sufficient to avoid deep dependency trees, it probably helps to some degree but it’s definitely not a panacea.
The solution exists, and those are curated package repositories as we have in Linux distributions. In C I can simply install a -dev package and use some library which sees some quality control and security updates from the distribution.
The problem is that the UNIX shell model got very successful and is now also used on other platforms with poor package management, so all the language-level packaging system were created instead. But those did not learn from the lessons of Linux distributions. Cargo is particularly bad.
They're not either, every one of these projects contains a gigantic vendor/ folder full of unmaintained libraries, modified so much that keeping up with the latest changes is impossible so they're stuck with whatever version they copied back in 2009.
I've been wanting a capability based security model for years. Argued about it here in fact. Capabilities are kind of an object pointer with associated permissions - like a unix file descriptor.
We should have:
- OS level capabilities. Launched programs get passed a capability token from the shell (or wherever you launched the program from). All syscalls take a capability as the first argument. So, "open path /foo" becomes open(cap, "/foo"). The capability could correspond to a fake filesystem, real branch of your filesystem, network filesystem or really anything. The program doesn't get to know what kind of sandbox it lives inside.
- Library / language capabilities. When I pull in some 3rd party library - like an npm module - that library should also be passed a capability too, either at import time or per callsite. It shouldn't have read/write access to all other bytes in my program's address space. It shouldn't have access to do anything on my computer as if it were me! The question is: "What is the blast radius of this code?" If the library you're using is malicious or vulnerable, we need to have sane defaults for how much damage can be caused. Calling lib::add(1, 2) shouldn't be able to result in a persistent compromise of my entire computer.
SeL4 has fast, efficient OS level capabilities. Its had them for years. They work great. They're fast - faster than linux in many cases. And tremendously useful. They allow for transparent sandboxing, userland drivers, IPC, security improvements, and more. You can even run linux as a process in sel4. I want an OS that has all the features of my linux desktop, but works like SeL4.
Unfortunately, I don't think any programming language has the kind of language level capabilities I want. Rust is really close. We need a way to restrict a 3rd party crate from calling any unsafe code (including from untrusted dependencies). We need to fix the long standing soundness bugs in rust. And we need a capability based standard library. No more global open() / listen() / etc. Only openat(), and equivalents for all other parts of the OS.
If LLMs keep getting better, I'm going to get an LLM to build all this stuff in a few years if nobody else does it first. Security on modern desktop operating systems is a joke.
Capabilities have a lot of serious design problems which is why no mainstream language has them. Because this comes up so often on HN I wrote an essay explaining the issues here:
But as pointed out by others, this particular exploit wouldn't be stopped by capabilities. Nor would it be stopped by micro-kernels. The filesystem is a trusted entity on any OS design I'm familiar with as it's what holds the core metadata about what components have what permissions. If you can exploit the filesystem code, you can trivially obtain any permission. That the code runs outside of the CPU's supervisor mode means nothing.
The only techniques we have to stop bugs like this are garbage collection or use of something like Rust's affine type system. You could in principle write a kernel in a language like C#, Java or Kotlin and it would be immune to these sorts of bugs.
Note that capabilities would not help for those bugs we are discussing today.
Those exploits are in kernel, and the userspace is only calling the normal, allowed calls. Removing global open()/listen()/etc.. with capability-based versions would still allow one to invoke the same kernel bugs.
(Now, using microkernel like seL4 where the kernel drivers are isolated _would_ help, but (1) that's independent from what userspace does, you can have POSIX layer with seL4 and (2) that would be may more context switches, so a performance drop)
> Note that capabilities would not help for those bugs we are discussing today.
Yes they would. Copyfail uses a bug in the linux kernel to write to arbitrary page table entries. A kernel like SeL4 puts the filesystem in a separate process. The kernel doesn't have a filesystem page table entry that it can corrupt.
Even if the bug somehow got in, the exploit chain uses the page table bug to overwrite the code in su. This can be used to get root because su has suid set. In a capability based OS, there is no "su" process to exploit like this.
A lot of these bugs seem to come from linux's monolithic nature meaning (complex code A) + (complex code B) leads to a bug. Microkernels make these sort of problems much harder to exploit because each component is small and easier to audit. And there's much bigger walls up between sections. Kernel ALG support wouldn't have raw access to overwrite page table entries in the first place.
> (2) that would be may more context switches, so a performance drop
I've heard this before. Is it actually true though? The SeL4 devs claim the context switching performance in sel4 is way better than it is in linux. There are only 11 syscalls - so optimising them is easier. Invoking a capability (like a file handle) in sel4 doesn't involve any complex scheduler lookups. Your process just hands your scheduler timeslice to the process on the other end of the invoked capability (like the filesystem driver).
But SeL4 will probably have more TLB flushes. I'm not really sure how expensive they are on modern silicon.
I'd love to see some real benchmarks doing heavy IO or something in linux and sel4. I'm not really sure how it would shake out.
Yes. But its nowhere near as powerful as capabilities.
- Pledge requires the program drop privileges. Process level caps move the "allowed actions" outside of an application. And they can do that without the application even knowing. This would - for example - let you sandbox an untrusted binary.
- Pledge still leaves an entire application in the same security zone. If your process needs network and disk access, every part of the process - including 3rd party libraries - gets access to the network and disk.
- You can reproduce pledge with caps very easily. Capability libraries generally let you make a child capability. So, cap A has access to resources x, y, z. Make cap B with access to only resource x. You could use this (combined with a global "root cap" in your process) to implement pledge. You can't use pledge to make caps.
Most people will avoid sticking things in their mouth by default. They don't wait for the microbial cultures to come back positive to say no.
We need a cultural shift toward code hygiene, which isn't really any different from the norms most cultures develop around food. It's a mix of crude heuristics but the sense of "eeew" is keeping billions of people alive.
The billions of burgers served by fast food franchises with long histories of poisoning people would argue that delicious convenience overrides the hygiene instinct.
Which is to say: Hiding the sausage-making is a core aspect of what makes supply chains profitable.
They stole the axios's npm keys and they uploaded malicious artifacts. They did not takeover the axios's repo. The issue is with packaging and distribution, not with code.
Indeed - one year ago we floated the idea it is better to write your code if you can, than get third parties. But it was a heresy at the time to consider LLMm filling the gaps.
Today I’m limiting the exposure to dependencies more than ever, and particularly for things that take few hundred lines to implement. It’s a paradigm shift, no less.
This replaces supply chain trust with the trust in the LLM and the provider you're using. Even if you exclude model devs from your threat model and are running the LLM yourself, it's still an uninterpretable black box that is trained on the web data which can be and is manipulated precisely to attack LLMs during training. So this approach still needs proper supply chain security.
Well it needs, and in particular if you use an adversarial model tuned to inject malware. Not sure if it was researched though to this degree and no provider would tell you anyways I guess :)
There are a lot of libs you really can't justify implementing from scratch. Mathjs and node-mysql jump to mind. Poisoned chains build up from small dependencies, and clearly staying on top of your dependency chain should be a full time job - if anyone was willing to pay someone to do that full time.
Of course, and thank God for them. But many more look more complicated and serve more use case than you typically actually need. Like - how much of ffmpeg you need, well depends on the project. And perhaps someone is happily tearing it down with LLM to get precisely these parts (not me, though I enjoy doing it to LLMs and other models).
But being able to have agents implement pelr5 in rust and make it faster and more secure raises many questions towards the role of open source and consequences of security and supply chain risks.
I am feeling really uncomfortable sitting on a large React project.
Whether to do constant npm upgrades to keep the high-priority security issues count at zero (for what seems like about 15 minutes), or whether to hang back a bit to avoid catching the big one that everyone knows is coming real soon now.
Realistically, most folks don't get paid to mitigate long term risks by deviation from the common (and more efficient) practice.
Big companies have security roles on multiple levels, enforcing policies and not allowing devs to just install any package. That's not new but started maybe 15 years ago.
I am feasting on Schadenfreude as SWEs industry grapples with the messes it made and an uncertain employability in the near future; AI is not 30 years away like when I started.
All the arrogant asocial coder bros cast aside.
All the poorly reasoned shortcuts due to hustle culture and "git pull the world" engineering, startups aura farm on Twitter/social media about their cool sweatshop labor exploiting tech jobs...
Watching AI come around and the 2010s messes blow up in faces... chefs kiss
Considering the amount of money at stake, Software is a deeply, deeply unserious and careless industry, and a great many practitioners are also deeply unserious and careless people. Yet, somehow the world goes on, these companies siphon up money, and all harms they cause are externalized.
> Considering the amount of money at stake, Software is a deeply, deeply unserious and careless industry, and a great many practitioners are also deeply unserious and careless people.
What else do you expect, given the economic incentives on one side, and the immaturity of the discipline on the other? Writing robust software requires time, money and competence, in a purely empirical approach, since we have no fundamental theory of software. The pressure is for quantity and features in minimum time. The approaches are incompatible, and economics win every time.
Well yeah; data breaches been a thing forever. Physical reality never opened a black hole in San Fran because someone committed a key to Github or a box of tapes destined for Iron Mountain vanished. A lot of the concerns are themselves social paranoias not real concerns.
Which is where the unserious emerges but in a subtle way; taking such unserious things so seriously is not serious behavior. It's anxious and paranoid, aloof and clueless behavior.
Secure in tech skills but unserious otherwise.
Lacking a broad set of skills will make office workers unable to grow a potato inherently paranoid about their job.
IT is (was?) one of the very few ways for us in third-world countries to pull ourselves out of poverty by our own bootstraps, since social mobility is quite limited if you lack the right connections. I'm pleased with you being so happy about it being taken away to make more money for billionaires.
AI was the goal all along; it's not even a secret. Papers on self learning computers go back decades.
It was merely untenable due to hardware limits and now outdated software development patterns.
Big data SaaS companies were never the end goal. They were a stepping stone to AI. A lab to test AI theory.
So your runway and moat so to speak were never real. Merely temporary science research.
I don't think the wealth should go to billionaires. Nor do I think your life should be spent dancing like a monkey to their organ, while you convince yourself to soothe the soul its for a greater good.
Perhaps your country should engage in substance collective action. Because this whole time you were just a pawn of billionaires who don't know you exist. As such they never cared about providing you assurances. You were just cheaper labor.
This is a baffling take.. These exploits are local privilege escalations for linux systems. They'll allow an attacker with a foothold in a shared environment or with low privilege access to a system to affect the rest of the system. They aren't RCEs and won't let attackers access environments that they couldn't before other than the shared hosting scenarios.
That is absolutely not how most supply chain attacks are carried out. Most supply chain attacks are performed via credential theft and social engineering. The more sophisticated ones are APT style attacks like the Solarwinds one (which were carried out by organisations that would already have exploits like these) or more creative stuff like the Shai-Hulud fiasco. All of these options existed before these LPEs. If you're worried about supply chain attacks you've been worried for longer than Mythos has been out.
Not updating your software is never good security advice.
Either my reading of your comment is wrong or you misunderstood the supply chain comment by OP I think: what they mean is that a supply chain attack that gets the exploit on a system would be great now because the reported vulns are unfixed pretty much everywhere
No, you read it right. I just misunderstood the post's message as "these exploits will enable more supply chain attacks". I'll probably delete my comment since it's debating a strawman. It is absolutely right that these exploits might enable these attacks to have a larger impact. I still don't think that I agree with the message since a malicious npm package already installed can get its payloads from a C2 server, it doesn't need an npm update.
attack on next sudo call, shows data accessible only to root.
Our security model based on distributions verifying packages, that is distro maintainers. Software we can't trust should be running in VMs. Attack on trivy is just the beginning and solution is removing pip, uv, npm, rbenv from host, running in docker containers:
$ docker run -it -v.:/app -w /app node:alpine /bin/sh
"Wait a week to install software" does not work. Just a few months ago a massive exploit hit the web, which was a timed attack which sat for more than a month before executing. If everyone starts waiting a week, their exploits will wait 2 weeks. Cyber criminals do not need to exploit you immediately, they just need to exploit you. (It also doesn't change a large range of vuln classes like typosquatting)
I think the author was suggesting "wait a week" as a one-time wait for fixes to be written and patches distributed for these specific prematurely-disclosed vulnerabilities, not an on-going suggestion for delaying all updates. But otherwise I agree with you.
> If everyone starts waiting a week, their exploits will wait 2 weeks
It's much easier to break into an NPM/Github account and push malicious commits in the few hours a maintainer is sleeping than it is to push something out and not have it noticed for 2 weeks.
There are lists of attacks which had an exposure window which was much shorter than 2 weeks:
I think you misunderstood the article. The proposal isn't wait a week after Software has been published before installing it. It's in the next seven days starting now, just don't, because you probably don't have patches for these vulnerabilities and even if you do there's probably more scary vulnerabilities about to be discovered.
> Right now would be one of the best times for a supply chain attack via NPM to hit hard.
Given the local kernel root exploits, people pulling npm dependencies have an extra high chance of getting rooted. This includes test systems, build systems, the web server running node.js backend, etc. etc. etc.
This means that there is a significantly greater chance that whatever software you download (not necessarily npm-based) on the internet in these couple days has been unknowingly infected with backdoors, simply due to the fact that the vast majority of servers out there that use npm code have easily exploitable vulnerabilities.
well then let's wait a month or even two months. The point of the wait period is primarily to avoid the new installation of exploits, not the execution of already installed exploits.
A popular package has more exposure. When the artefact is published, the entire world can see it. Hopefully some people check the diff between versions. But without any delays then you could be hit by exploits nobody has seen yet.
Every dependency compromise that I can remember "in the past few months" were discovered in hours, if not minutes (litllm, axios, bitwarden CLI, Checkmarx docker images, Pytorch lightning, intercom/intercom-php). What's more, the discovery of these compromises did not at all rely on whether the compromises were actively used.
That's why I don't understand:
> If everyone starts waiting a week, their exploits will wait 2 weeks
Alternatively, switch to an operating system like FreeBSD which doesn't take a YOLO approach to security. Security fixes don't just get tossed into the FreeBSD kernel without coordination; they go through the FreeBSD security team and we have binary updates (via FreeBSD Update, and via pkgbase for 15.0-RELEASE) published within a couple minutes of the patches hitting the src tree. (Roughly speaking, a few seconds for the "I've pushed the patches" message to go out on slack, 10-30 seconds for patches to be uploaded, and up to a minute for mirrors to sync).
I'm somewhat skeptical here, because I notified the FreeBSD security team of a vulnerability a few years ago, and I never got a response, even after a follow-up email a few weeks later. To be fair, my report was about a non-core component, and the vulnerability wouldn't be very easy to exploit, but Debian, OpenBSD, SUSE, and Gentoo all patched it within a week [0].
That being said, I'm not suggesting that anyone should judge an entire OS based off of how they handle a single minor report, since everything else that I've seen suggests that FreeBSD takes security reports quite seriously. But then you could also use this same argument for the Linux kernel bug, since it's pretty rare for a patch to be mismanaged like this there too :)
Linux Kernel doesn’t differentiate between security bugs and other bugs, which is the main complaint here I think. They have the same process.
So the issue is bigger than the mishandling of a single issue, it’s a fundamental process issue around security for one of the most impactful projects in the entire space.
If you are switching to a BSD for security reasons, why FreeBSD? Isn't OpenBSD the super secure one? Sorry, it's been a while since I've looked at those projects
The person suggesting FreeBSD is a FreeBSD developer (Colin Percival - actually according to Wikipedia FreeBSD engineering lead), would be weird for him to suggest openbsd.
Also hilarious to see Drew Houston responding a bit later on the same thread:
> we're in a similar space -- http://www.getdropbox.com (and part of the yc summer 07 program) basically, sync and backup done right (but for windows and os x). i had the same frustrations as you with existing solutions.
> let me know if it's something you're interested in, or if you want to chat about it sometime.
FreeBSD didn’t have user land ASLR until 2019 and, amongst other mitigations, still doesn’t have kASLR. It’s not a serious operating system for people who care about security. If you want FreeBSD and security take Shawn Webb’s HardenedBSD.
>Last I read, ASLR is a good thing to have, but overall is usually not difficult to defeat.
For local attackers there may be easier avenues to leak the ASLR slide, but for remote attackers it's almost universally agreed it significantly raises the bar.
>I don't think it's reasonable to say that an OS that lacks it isn't "serious" about security.
When they implemented it in 2019 it had been an 18-year-old mitigation. If you are serious about security, you implement everything that raises the bar. The term "defense-in-depth" exists for a reason, and ASLR is probably one of the easiest and most effective defense-in-depth measures you can implement that doesn't necessarily require changes from existing code other than compiling with -pie.
They exploited a linear stack buffer overflow. Not a write-what-where or arb write. A linear stack buffer overflow in 2026! There are at least two distinct failures there:
There’s always a guy. It’s great that your favorite distro is definitely safer. An order of magnitude fewer exploits will mean only a few thousand or so, I suppose. Ozymandis used Gentoo.
FreeBSD is not a distro. It's not even Linux; it's a completely different kernel and operating system that traces back to even before Linux. It's honestly closer to Darwin than it is to Linux; macOS is technically a BSD. (Not FreeBSD though.)
Been constructing a lot of infrastructure servers recently, almost all of them FreeBSD VMs running under bhyve on FreeBSD physical hosts. It's a very simple, clean, pleasant environment to work in. And they all run tarsnap. ;-)
Debian is probably the best of all the Linuxes, but still suffers from split-brain: If patches are sent upstream first, Debian can't start digesting them until they're already public.
With FreeBSD there's never any question of "who should this get reported to".
> Debian can't start digesting them until they're already public
Not sure what you mean by this. Debian is able to handle coordinated disclosures (when they're actually coordinated), and get embargoed security updates out rapidly without breaking the embargo.
Is there some other aspect of this that you're referencing?
The key words there are "when they're actually coordinated". Debian doesn't own the Linux kernel, and the kernel developers don't bother with coordinated disclosure, so the happy path of coordinated disclosure only happens when reporters make the non-obvious choice of reporting vulnerabilities to people other than the maintainers.
curl | sh is more prevalent in Linux where you can expect a stable ABI from the kernel and sometimes GNU libc. No such things in BSD land. Packages are built against a release always. They don't maintain binary compatibility.
There's already an okay solution to supply-chain attacks against dependency managers like npm, PyPI, and Cargo: set them to only install package versions that are more than a few days old. The recent high-profile attacks were all caught and rolled back within a day, so doing this would have let you safely avoid the attacks. It really should be the default behavior. Let self-selected beta testers and security scanner companies try out the newest versions of packages for a day before you try them. Instructions: https://cooldowns.dev/
An artifact manager. Only get what you approve. So you can get fast updates when needed and consistently known stable when you need it. Does need a little config override - easy work.
I had my own janky tooling for something like it. This is a good project.
Does that really scale well? Thanks to cascading dependencies, even a medium sized project can import hundreds of dependencies. Can a developer really review them all to figure out if they are safe and that there's not security fix that was fixed in a newer version of the package?
Yes, that is what is required. Every dependency needs an internal owner and reviewer. Every change needs to be reviewed and brought into the internal repository.
If no one is willing to stand up and say "yes this is safe and of acceptable quality", why use it?
It's a software engineering version of the professional engineering stamp.
So you get security updates late too? Many vulnerabilities are in the wild for years before being noticed, and patched.
Once noticed, that's where the exploit explosion erupts, excited exploiters everywhere, emboldened... enticed... excessively encouraged, by your delayed updates.
Presumably npm exempts security updates from its minimum release age, but even if it doesn't, I think the times where you need an important security update are relatively rare enough that handling the real cases on a case-by-case basis with whitelisting is fine. Outside of Next.js's React2Shell vulnerability last year, I'm not sure I've ever had a security update of a dependency written in a memory-safe language (ie. not C/C++) which I've installed through npm/PyPI/Cargo that patched a security vulnerability that had been making my application exploitable to others in practice. Almost all security vulnerabilities I've personally seen flagged through npm are about things I only use at build-time and are only relevant if a user can create and pass an arbitrary object to the function, which is rarely the case. Most security vulnerabilities I've encountered and fixed in working on web apps were things like XSS, SQL injections, and improperly enforced permissions, and they nearly always happened in the application's own code rather than inside a dependency.
> exempts security updates from its minimum release age
If it does, doesn't that defeat the purpose? If a package is compromised, of course the compromiser will just label their new version as a "security update".
IMO, the most sustainable version is either the linux distros/bsd ports/homebrew models. You don't push new libraries to the public registry, instead you write a packaging script that gets reviewed for every new changes.
Another model is Perl's CPAN where you publish source files only.
Trust me, as someone who has contributed to such a package set, almost nobody is inspecting diffs between upstream versions when updating a package. Only the package definitions themselves are reviewed, but they are typically only version + hash bumps.
Reviewing upstream diffs for every package requires a lot of man hours and most packagers are volunteers. I guess LLMs might help catching some obvious cases.
Not really talking about upstream. Most supply attacks I’ve heard about are stolen secrets and artifacts uploading. They’re not about repositories or websites being taken over. As the packaging scripts are often in repos, you detect easily if people are trying to update where upstream points to.
I think what we have to start accepting even security experts is that our world is incredibly fragile. I think people realy understimate this. And I do not mean just the IT world but the entire world is built on many incredibly fragile balances. Security Exploits will always exist. Not just in software but in real life. Heck someone managed to Sneak into a Security Conference. And that guy was a random youtuber. Granted that was not like a high security thing. But thats just an example I had of the top of my head. Basically it is realy easy to circumvent security in most cases.
What I want to say with that is fundamentally our world works because atleast most people do not abuse shit. That is fundamentally how human society has always worked, and will likely continue to do so.
I remember there was a trend with some UK Influencers using some "Ladder and a High-vis" tricks to enter places for a while to show how rough physical security is [0]. I believe its the youtuber, Max Fosh, who managed to do it back to back at the International Security Expo, first in the UK [1] and then in the US [2], with the fake names 'Rob Banks' and 'Nick Everything'.
I've studied security culture before and in most cases everything comes down to a sliding scale with security on one side and convenience/accessibility on the other, the more secure something is, the less accessible it is and vice versa.
If I'm being really frank, are system updates not more disruptive, destructive and result in more data loss and downtime than all the attacks you'll experience in your lifetime? (unless you're a high value business target ofc, I'm talking for personal machines)
In my book, having unattended-upgrades or windows update run amok on your system is functionally worse than a rootkit.
This. Lost hours from the hours running the updates, lost hours from the occasional faulty upgrade, and every now and again it's fail spectacularly and need a restore from backup to return to productivity. No matter if it's Ubuntu LTS or non-LTS, every six months there's always something radically changed. OpenSUSE Leap has the same problem. I'm looking at Tumbleweed but a new version every week is going to break occasionally. Gentoo build-from-source is going to have weirdness every now and again, if not utter ruin. MacOS updates yearly, and brings horrors with every point zero release. Windows is Windows, and those problems are well known. I don't think there's a way around it with the current offerings.
It's a problem we have to live with for the sake of progress and for security updates. Every machine needs downtime for maintenance on a periodic, often-scheduled basis. It might cost time but avoiding updates is not a good plan.
Aside from dodgy updates that have to run as root to install, if you have passwordless sudo it's more dangerous than any broken package or local-only privilege escalation exploit. I'll wager many have it set up that way, because typing passwords is tiresome.
For the newer players who have gotten into continuous integration and containerized builds, consider checking on your systems to be sure you're not pulling 'latest' across a bunch of packages with every build.
We set up our base containers with all the external dependencies already in them and then only update those explicitly when we decide it's time.
This means we might be a bit behind the bleeding edge, but we're also taking on a lot less risk with random supply chain vulns getting instant global distribution.
The patches for the latest vulnerabilities aren’t even out yet. So it would be a real bad time for a new supply chain attack since it would get root on pretty much every system.
Actively destructive opinion article. I could not begin to understand the rationale.
It takes 45 seconds to go check how old the copyfail and dirtyfrag vulnerabilities actually are. Which is longer than it takes to read TFA. Dirtyfrag may be relevant to systems from as far as 2017.
It's not "new" software being affected. And actual old software is in a much worse state because we had a lot more time to find their problems.
This is why I avoid the entire JavaScript shitshow that is NPM and all that ecosystems nonsense. The population of users do not have the secondary considerations to be trusted, there will always be someone that does the worse and talks too many into following them. Then the "best practices" produce failures. What a shit show.
Literally implemented PR guards today to prevent the team merging any dependencies that didn’t have explicit versions pinned (and that matched the resolution in the lock file).
People lamented semver not being trustable but that ship sailed a long time ago, and supply chain attacks are going to get worse before they get better.
Our team is pretty minimal when it comes to enforced hooks (everyone has their own workflow) but no one could come up with an objection to this one.
I'm holding off on upgrading to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS until we have a few months of experience with the new release. Canonical just had a huge DDOS attack, and there might have been other attacks hidden in all that traffic.
I saw a recent post about only adopting packages a certain number of days post release (say +3 days, or +7 days) after. The idea is you never bring in fresh commits, only older ones. This would need dangerous or bad commits to be marked vulnerable too.
It means you skip supply chain attacks but may miss fresh vulnerability patches too.
This gets me to ask whether I have been hacked . For a few weeks now, both my main mbp and iPhone have been showing unexpected hangs of 1-30 seconds. I can’t find out what’s causing it - not memory pressure, not cpu load.
I am worried that the sluggishness appeared about the same time on both devices
For ios, rebooting your phone is extremely effective at removing exploits. The boot chain attestation stuff can verify the system is in a known state. If you are ultra paranoid you could enable lockdown mode which preemptively disables the entrypoints for exploits. So far I don't believe there has been any exploit which works with lockdown mode enabled.
Getting persistent root is actually quite difficult on mobile operating systems. iOS famously so, but unless you're running a custom ROM other than Graphene, Android has some solid protections as well.
Regular phone reboots are a security measure at this point.
It does though, the exploit exists in memory. When you reboot the phone the memory is reset, if it's modified system files, the checksums won't pass and your phone will refuse to boot. Requiring it to be wiped and reinstalled.
These days most exploits can not persist through a reboot due to secureboot and other bootchain attestations. In the boot process, everything loaded gets checksummed and compared to signed signatures from Apple, but this only helps at load time, not while the phone is running. Of course if the phone is not patched, the exploit could be reloaded, but this would require revising a malicious website or reopening a malicious bit of media.
In this case, no insiders broke the embargo. It was reverse engineered from the patch by an unrelated third party and a proof of concept immediately came out of it. At that point, it's kinda fair game.
I assume that while Mythos may be really good at finding vulnerabilities, lighter models may still do a pretty good job of explaining/exploiting the vulnerability if given the patch which fixes it.
Less a gentleman's agreement and more of a question of economic incentives going away. Companies aren't paying out bounties at the rates they used to (possibly because they've realized there's little financial incentive to do so for most findings) and simultaneously they're being inundated with AI slop findings that somehow have to still be triaged and evaluated.
> Because the responsible disclosure schedule and the embargo have been broken, no patch exists for any distribution.
I had to do a double take reading that. It’s written something happened and prevented them from following a schedule but seemingly they chose to release the information. I hope I’m missing something where it was forcibly disclosed elsewhere.
Edit:
Moments later I refreshed the homepage and saw the announcement. They do claim to have consulted with maintainers
With copy.fail the security patch wasn't listed as such so there wasn't a lot of attention on the issue as it remained dormant in most kernels for a while.
I don't doubt that the patch reversal + exploit PoC made by a third party is the result of people figuring out how patches work in open source projects like these.
Anyone with access to a good enough LLM can scour through supposedly minor bug fixes that might hide a critical vulnerability rather than doing it all manually. The LLM will probably throw up tons of false positives and miss half the issues, it you only need one or two successes.
At some point, some people will rebuild an entire stack (all layers, from OS to applications) with proof carrying code upgrades. Proof-code co-design and co-construction is the only way to execute code that you can trust.
Problem here is Brew does things in an anti-unix way by default, the auto updating of packages being the prominent reason.
I personally switched away from macOS with this being one of the reasons, after having realized brew will eventually compromise my system with their antics.
Yes, and, for non-personal machines or anything connected to the internet: now is a great time to get good at rolling out patches and new releases quickly.
I wonder whether there is any tool that can prevent npm from downloading any package that has been published in the last month. While I miss out on possible fixes, this would prevent downloading some 3rd level dep that takes over my machine.
NPM seems to have introduced the flag `minimumReleaseAge` for this exact purpose. However even though are many recent references to it[0][1][2] I don't see it anywhere in the NPM documentation.
The whole (mistaken) belief that Linux and macOS didn't require AV was based on the execute bit being present, something Microsoft fixed back in XP by making downloaded files as such and preventing them from being opened trivially.
If you have code execution, you can attack the OS.
Indeed, when one installs dependencies all over the Internet, or even better, key projects use "curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh" as default suggestion on how to install them, attackers have the work done for them.
> key projects use "curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh" as default suggestion
This is exactly why some (including me) don't take these projects seriously. Like you claim to design a language for security, and this is how you tell me to install it????
To mitigate supply chain attacks like this, I've taken to specifying exact versions in my Rust cargo.toml, and when importing new crates, select the previous-to-latest version. Is this a reasonable mitigation? It bugs me that Swift deprecates the concept of specifying exact versions, it actively pushes you towards semver which leaves the door open to this.
Am I missing part of the article? This seems like 2 sentences saying "don't install anything cause some Linux LPEs came out." I don't understand why this is on the frontpage of HN.
Except that a lot of software likely is already broken in fun ways we currently don't know about. That is what makes it such a "fun" challenge. Supply chain attacks are one thing, but CVEs in already released software allowing other attackers are another.
As always, I know most of us work in IT, but things rarely are actually binary.
You don't need a kernel LPE to root a Linux developer machine.
Just alias sudo to sudo-but-also-keep-password-and-execute-a-payload in ~/.bashrc and wait up to 24 hours. Maybe also simulate some breakage by intercepting other commands and force the user to run 'sudo systemctl' or something sooner rather than later.
this, this is something I don't understand there are a billion ways to gain root once you control the user that regulary uses sudo.
this is only scary for rootless containers as it skips an isolation layer, but we've started shipping distroless containers which are not vulnerable to this due to the fact that they lack priviledge escalation commands such as su or sudo.
never trust software to begin with, sandbox everything you can and don't run it on your machine to begin with if possible.
First, if you control the account of the administrator, you already have a worst case scenario. Second, this is why distros tell you to not use sudo. The purpose of sudo is to give some people the ability to run a very specific program with elevated privileges that wouldn't be allowed otherwise, while you don't want them to have any other administrative rights. If you want someone to be an admin over the system, just give them the root password.
I agree that de facto the biggest security flaw in Linux is "okay I'm tired of getting interrupted all day assisting you, I know you're competent, I'll put you on the sudoers list."
But there are a lot of academic and research institutions that actually do have good Linux user management. I worked at a pediatric hospital, and the RHEL HPC admins did not mess around in terms of who was allowed to access which patients' data. As someone who was not an admin, it was a huge pain and it should have been. So this bug has pretty serious implications, seems like anyone at that hospital can abscond with a lot of deidentified data. [research HPC not as sensitive as the clinical stuff, which I think was all Windows Server]
I think we've concluded already that user isolation is not safe and shouldn't be trusted, that's why we've invested to hard into namespacing(containers). users should only have what they need if you really care about security and don't want to tolerate the overhead of virtualization based security.
> this, this is something I don't understand there are a billion ways to gain root once you control the user that regulary uses sudo.
I won't enter into all the details but... It's totally possible to not have the sudo command (or similar) on a system at all and to have su with the setuid bit off.
On my main desktop there's no sudo command there are zero binaries with the setuid bit set.
The only way to get root involves an "out-of-band" access, from another computer, that is not on the regular network [1].
This setup as worked for me since years. And years. And I very rarely need to be root on my desktop. When I do, I just use my out-of-band connection (from a tiny laptop whose only purpose is to perform root operations on my desktop).
For example today: I logged in as root blocked the three modules with the "dirty page" mitigation suggested by the person who reported the exploit.
You're not faking sudo with a mocking-bird on my machine. You're not using "su" from a regular user account. No userns either (no "insmod", no nothing).
Note that it's still possible to have several non-root users logged in as once: but from one user account, you cannot log in as another. You can however switch to TTY2, TTY3, etc. and log in as another user. And the whole XKCD about "get local account, get everything of importance", ain't valid either in my case.
I'm not saying it's perfect but it's not as simple as "get a local shell, wait until user enters 'sudo', get root". No sudo, no su.
It's brutally simple.
And, the best of all, it's a fully usable desktop: I'm using such a setup since years (I've also got servers, including at home, with Proxmox and VMs etc., but that's another topic).
Do you install system-wide software at all? How do you configure it?
That's my main reason to use "sudo" on the desktop.
I suppose I could install every piece of software locally, either from source or via flatpak, but this is a lot of work and much harder than doing it the easy way and using global install via my distro. Plus, non-distro installs are much more likely to be out of date and contain vulnerabilities of their own.
but they all have something in common, the issue is that your user is compromised that means the applications running in that user are compromised the only thing you gain is that you can trust your system, you can trust that your system is not compromised which is only relevant with infrastructure since if your user is compromised you're already fucked, multi-user setups with untrusted accounts are inheritly insecure and in infrastrucure the blast radius might be thousands of users that use the said service.
the breakdown looks something like this:
- you heavily compromise a single user <- exploit not relevant
- you compromise a shared setup via a bad user to compromise a lot of users <- should never be used anymore, namespace isolation is the replacement
- you somewhat compromise a lot of users via infra compromise <- where this hurts
Yes, you are very special and smart. Good for you!
Most people however aren't and will happily run sudo after an npm postinstall script tells them to apt-install turboencabulator for their new frontend framework to function.
right, a bigger issue is multitenant systems, which are common in academia (I manage several such systems for various experiments). Now, we generally trust the users to not be malicious, but most don't get sudo, because physicists tend to think they know what they're doing when they don't really (except for me, of course).
Something that concerns me more is I use things like gemini-cli or claude-cli via their own, non-sudo accounts with no ssh keys or anything on my laptop, but a LPE means they can find away around such restrictions if they feel like it (and they might).
Personally I'm choosing to keep my home server behind a VPN and to enable Lockdown Mode on my phone and laptop for a while until the dust settles. As well as just limiting the software installed to trusted projects only.
VM isolation would still be safe even with these kernel exploits.
What are people thinking with these meme style vulnerability names? It's going to be hard to pitch "we need to push back the timeline on this new infrastructure deploy while we mitigate Copy Fail 2: Electric Boogaloo".
Of course, why didn't anyone think of that ? I bet if someone started to ship software that has no errors they'll make a huge amount of money, especially from all the people that are security-minded !
There is currently only method to prove absence of errors, this method is not LLMs, it's formal verification methods. Currently only very little formal verification is used in software industry, static type checking.
Fun fact: You still can't build the vllm container with updated dependencies since llmlite got pwned. Either due to regression bugs, or due to impossible transient dependencies in the dependency tree that are not resolvable. There is just too much slopcode down the line, and too many dependencies relying on pinned outdated (and unpublished) dependencies.
I switched to llama.cpp because of that.
To me it feels more and more that the slopcode world is the opposite philosophy of reproducible builds. It's like the anti methodology of how to work in that regard.
Before, everyone was publishing breaking changes in subminor packages because nobody adhered to any API versioning system standards. Now it's every commit that can break things. That is not an improvement.
Write only code is such a bad bad idea. No one is reviewing 20k loc PRS with 15 new dependencies in an afternoon. Sorry it's just not happening I don't care how many years you have been a software engineer. Yet that's the new thing and how we all are supposed to work or else we are all Luddites.
I'm personally waiting to be downgraded to simply being called "lazy".
When I see pages of obviously generated prose being submitted as any kind of documentation, my eyes just glaze over. I feel so guilty sharing similar stuff too, though to my credit, at least I always lead with a self-written TLDR, the slop is just for reference. But it's so bad, like genuinely distressing tier. I don't want to read all that junk, and more and more gets produced.
Prose type docs have always been my Achilles heel, and this is like the worst possible evolution of that.
For a brief period in the past few weeks, they somehow managed to make a change to ChatGPT Thinking that made it succint. The tone was super fact oriented too. It was honestly like waking up from a fever dream.
you raise a really good point. if everyone is doing this at exactly the same lag then it will eventually start hitting groups in sync at the exact same time
Fedora upgrades have usually been great, but I jumped the gun on Fedora 44. Sound completely dead with no Pipewire service available. ALSA not responding. Firefox dies immediately if I open a new tab or right click anywhere on the browser itself (inlcuding nightly builds). QEMU refuses to load. Maybe something got completely f'd in the upgrade process.. I never had an issue before having upgraded from Fedora 38 all the way to 43. I am too tired to investigate it all.
I know this is unrelated to the article, but related to the title.
If this is still the same install that you've been using since 38, you might find a clean install resolves some issues (whether or not your upgrade got botched). Also helps me get rid of software I installed that I don't use anymore, which I feel is relevant to this article. But part of why I love Silverblue so much is I don't have to worry about upgrades getting botched and fwiw as well, I haven't noticed any of those bugs on 44 across several very different machines.
I had a day 1 crashloop with KWin on the 2nd desktop, but on day 2 some package update fixed it. Honestly it isn't the first time Fedora upgrades have messed something up for me either but I do think it's more stable than the average Ubuntu release, not that I've upgraded ubuntu in like 5 yrs.
Don't install anything, use an LLM to write everything from scratch. It may have bugs, but no one will know how to exploit them, especially when closed source.
Code is cheap and is becoming cheaper by the day. We need new paradigms.
LLMs have been used to scan binary blobs for exploits already. What would be more effective is a system designed with multiple layers of security so any one exploit is largely useless.
This was always a nightmare waiting to happen. The sheer mass of packages and the consequent vast attack surface for supply chain attacks was always a problem that was eventually going to blow up in everyone's face.
But it was too convenient. Anyone warning about it or trying to limit the damage was shouted down by people who had no experience of any other way of doing things. "import antigravity" is just too easy to do without.
Well, now we're reaching the "find out" part of the process I guess.
I worked for one company where we were super conservative. Every external component was versioned. Nothing was updated without review and usually after it had plenty of soak time. Pretty much everything built from source code (compilers, kernel etc.). Builds [build servers/infra] can't reach the Internet at all and there's process around getting any change in. We reviewed all relevant CVEs as they came out to make a call on if they apply to us or not and how we mitigate or address them.
Then I moved to another company where we had builds that access the Internet. We upgrade things as soon as they come out. And people think this is good practice because we're getting the latest bug fixes. CVEs are reviewed by a security team.
Then a startup with a mix of other practices. Some very good. But we also had a big CVE debt. e.g. we had secure boots on our servers and encrypted drives. We had a pretty good grasp on securing components talking to each other etc.
Everyone seems to think they are doing the right thing. It's impossible to convince the "frequent upgrader" that maybe that's a risk in terms of introducing new issues. We as an industry could really use a better set of practices. Example #1 for me is better in terms of dependency management. In general company #1 had well established security practices and we had really secure products.
I would rather work with a company that updates continuously, while also building security into multiple layers so that weaknesses in one layer can be mitigated by others.
For example, at one company I worked for, they created an ACL model for applications that essentially enforced rules like: “Application X in namespace A can communicate with me.” This ACL coordinated multiple technologies working together, including Kubernetes NetworkPolicies, Linkerd manifests with mTLS, and Entra ID application permissions. As a user, it was dead simple to use and abstracted away a lot of things i do not know that well.
The important part is not the specific implementation, but the mindset behind it.
An upgrade can both fix existing issues and introduce new ones. However, avoiding upgrades can create just as many problems — if not more — over time.
At the same time, I would argue that using software backed by a large community is even more important today, since bugs and vulnerabilities are more likely to receive attention, scrutiny, and timely fixes.
You forgot case #4: Worked at a startup where the frontend team thought it was a good idea to use lock files during development, but to do a "fresh" install of all dependecies during the deployment step.
And yes, they still thought they were doing the right thing.
To be fair npm makes (made?) it weirdly hard to use lock files so a lot of people did that by mistake. And when you do use lock, it reinstalls every time so a retagged package can just silently update.
FYI a retagged package would result in a different SHA512 integrity sum and fail the installation process. It won't "just silently update".
Anyway, the point of parent and me wasn't that it was considered to be a "mistake", but people thinking they "are doing the right thing".
I can’t comment on the behavior of ancient npm versions, but with modern npm I would not even know how to skip using a lockfile.
As for the parent comment about not using the lockfile for the production build, that’s just incredibly incompetent.
Maybe they should hire someone who knows what they are doing. Contrary to the popular beliefs of backend engineers online, you also need some competency to do frontend properly.
In this case what’s needed is „npm ci“ instead of „npm install“ or better „pnpm install —frozen-lockfile“.
Pnpm will also do that automatically if the CI environment variable is set.
> It's impossible to convince the "frequent upgrader" that maybe that's a risk in terms of introducing new issues
I would count myself as a "frequent upgrader" - I admin a bunch of Ubuntu machines and typically set them to auto-update each night. However, I am aware of the risks of introducing new issues, but that's offset by the risks of not upgrading when new bugs are found and patched. There's also the issue of organisations that fall far behind on versions of software which then creates an even bigger problem, though this is more common with Windows/proprietary software as you have less control over that. At least with Linux, you can generally find ways to install e.g. old versions of Java that may be required for specific tools.
There's no simple one-size-fits-all and it depends on the organisation's pool of skills as to whether it's better to proactively upgrade or to reluctantly upgrade at a slower pace. In my experience, the bugs introduced by new versions of software are easier to fix/workaround than the various issues of old software versions.
> Everyone seems to think they are doing the right thing
I like to think people would agree more on the appropriate method if they saw the risk as large enough.
If you could convince everyone that a nuclear bomb would get dropped on their heads (or a comparably devastating event) if a vulnerability gets in, I highly doubt a company like #2 would still believe they're doing things optimally, for example.
> if they saw the risk as large enough.
If you expose people to the true risks instead of allowing them to be ignorant, the conclusion that they might come to is that they shouldn’t develop software at all.
Really? You think the alternate mode where you're running 5-year-old versions of stuff with tons of known security flaws is better?
What part of "We reviewed all relevant CVEs as they came out to make a call on if they apply to us or not and how we mitigate or address them" gave you that impression?
>running 5-year-old versions of stuff with tons of known security flaws
No one in this thread proposed that, or anything that could be reasonably assumed to have meant that.
Do you ride an R1?
lim (num_packages_in_system -> inf) p(successful_supply_chain_attack) = 1
So, to play Pandora, what if the net effect of uncovering all these unknown attack vectors is it actually empties the holsters of every national intelligence service around the world? Just an idea I have been playing with. Say it basically cleans up everything and everyone looking for exploits has to start from scratch except “scratch” is now a place where any useful piece of software has been fuzz tested, property tested and formally verified.
Assuming we survive the gap period where every country chucks what they still have at their worst enemies, I mean. I suppose we can always hit each other with animal bones.
TBH this is a pretty good way of looking at it. Yeah we're seeing an explosion of vulnerabilities being found right now, but that (hopefully) means those vulnerabilities are all being cleaned up and we're entering a more hardened era of software. Minus the software packages that are being intentionally put out as exploits, of course. Maybe some might say it's too optimistic and naive, but I think you have a good point.
I agree with the prediction but not the timing. We won't enter a more hardened era of software until after a long period of security vulnerabilities.
Rivers caught on fire for a hundred years before the EPA was formed.
New code will also use these tools from the get go, hopefully vastly reducing the vulnerabilities that make it to prod to begin with.
The future may be distributed quite unevenly here, as they say, with a divergence between a small amount of "responsible" code in systems which leverage AI defensively, and a larger amount of vibe-coded / prompt-engineered code in systems which don't go through the extra trouble, and in fact create additional risk by cutting corners on human review. I personally know a lot of people using AI to create software faster, but none of them have created special security harnesses a la Mozilla (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/05/mozil...).
> we're entering a more hardened era of software
This is one force that operates. Another is that, in an effort to avoid depending on such a big attack surface, people are increasingly rolling their own code (with or without AI help) where they might previously have turned to an open source library.
I think the effect will generally be an increase in vulnerabilities, since the hand-rolled code hasn't had the same amount of time soaking in the real world as the equivalent OS library; there's no reason to assume the average author would magically create fewer bugs than the original OS library authors initially did. But the vulnerabilities will have much narrower scope: If you successfully exploit an OS library, you can hack a large fraction of all the code that uses it, while if you successfully exploit FooCorp's hand-rolled implementation, you can only hack FooCorp. This changes the economic incentive of funding vulnerabilities to exploit -- though less now than in the past, when you couldn't just point an LLM at your target and tell it "plz hack".
If I hand roll my logging library, I unlikely include automatic LDAP request based on message text (infamous Log4j vulnerability).
I’m seeing a lot of similar things during code reviews of substantially LLM-produced codebases now. Half-baked bad idea that probably leaked from training sets.
Typically when hand-rolling code you implement only what you require for your use-case, while a library will be more general purpose. As a consequence of doing more, have more code and more bugs.
Also, even seemingly trivial libraries can have bugs. The infamous leftpad library didn't handle certain edge doses properly.
For supply chain security and bug count, I'll take a focused custom implementation of specific features over a library full of generalized functionality.
Yes, a lot hinges on how little you can get away with implementing for your use case. If you have an XML config file with 3 settings in it, you probably won't need to implement handling of external entities the way a full XML parsing library would, which will close off an entire class of attendant vulnerabilities.
> Also, even seemingly trivial libraries can have bugs. The infamous leftpad library didn't handle certain edge doses properly.
This isn't really an argument in favour of having the average programmer reimplement stuff, though. For it to be, you'd have to argue that the leftpad author was unusually sloppy. That may be true in this specific case, but in general, I'm not persuaded that the average OSS author is worse than the average programmer overall. IMHO, contributing your work to an OSS ecosystem is already a mild signal of competence.
On the wider topic of reimplementation: Recently there was an article here about how the latest Ubuntu includes a bunch of coreutils binaries that have been rewritten in Rust. It turns out that, while this presumably reduced the number of memory corruption bugs (there was still one, somehow; I didn't dig into it), it introduced a bunch of new vulnerabilities, mostly caused by creating race conditions between checking a filesystem path and using the path for something.
This argument goes even further. If you have only 3 settings, why does it need to be an xml file?
ETA: I'm not saying it has to, I'm saying it's possible to imagine reasons that would justify this decision in some cases.
Because it might grow in future and you want to allow flexibility for that, because it might be the input to or output from some external system that requires XML, because your team might have standardised on always using XML config files, because introducing yet another custom plain text file format just creates unnecessary cognitive load for everyone who has to use it are real-world reasons I can think of.
But really I was just looking for a concrete example where I know the complexity of the implementation has definitely caused vulnerabilities, whether or not the choice to use it to solve the problem at hand was sensible. I have zero love for XML.
>there's no reason to assume the average author would magically create fewer bugs than the original OS library authors initially did
Have you read this old code? It's terrible and written with no care at all to security often in C. AI is much much better at writing code.
Do you have a specific library in mind? I think it would have to be an ancient, unmaintained C library.
But I think most OSS code isn't like this -- even C code born long ago, if it's still in wide use, has been hardened by now. Examples: Linux kernel, GNU userland, PostgreSQL, Python.
> even C code born long ago, if it's still in wide use, has been hardened by now. Examples: Linux kernel
There have been two LPE vulnerability and exploits in the Linux kernel announced today. After the one announced just last week. I don't think as much of the C code born long ago has been as carefully hardened as you think.
(Copy Fail 2 and Dirty Frag today, and Copy Fail last week)
One. "Copy Fail 2" and "Dirty Frag" are the same thing.
And consideing the size of the kenel, I call this stupendously good.
You (anyone, not you personally) write that much code yourself and let's see how well you did in comparison.
Sure, I didn't mean to say that these examples are guaranteed 100% safe -- just that I trust them to be enormously more safe than software that accomplishes the same task that was hand-written by either a human or an an LLM last week.
To be fair, to some extent that’s up to us. Time to get cleaning, I guess.
You are avoiding intentionally to say ‘thanks to LLMs’ or is implicit? As all these recent mega bugs surface with lots of fuzzing and agentic bashing, right ?
Thank you for reminding us all that you AI bros are still the most obnoxious people there are.
Having casually read into a few recent incidents the vector has often been outside of software. A lot of mis-configurations or simply attacking the human in the chain. And nation states have basically unbounded resources for everything from bribes, insiders, and even standing up entire companies.
I think it will be an arms race in the future as well. Easier to fix known vulnerabilities automatically, but also easier to find new ones and the occasionally AI fuckup instead of the occasionally human fuckup.
Yeah.
Right now it kinda feels to me like "Open Source" is the Russian army, assuming their sheer numbers and their huge quantity of equipment much off which is decades old.
Meanwhile attackers and bug hunters are like the Ukrainians, using new, inexpensive, and surprisingly powerful tools that none of the Open Source community has ever seen in the past, and for which it has very little defence capability.
The attackers with cheap drones or LLMs are completely overwhelming the old school who perhaps didn't notice how quickly the world has changed around them, or did notice but cannot do anything about quickly enough.
Well this argument was certainly inventive. What a weird impression to have about these things.
Who exactly is the innocent little Ukraine supposed to be that the big bad open source is supposed to be attacking to, what? take their land and make the OSS leader look powerful and successful at acheiving goals to distract from their fundamental awfulness? And who are the North Korean canon fodder purchased by OSS while we're at it?
Yeah it's just like that, practically the same situation. The authors of gnu cp and ls can't wait to get, idk, something apparently, out of the war they started when they attacked, idk, someone apparently.
New software is being generated faster than it can be adequately tested. We are in the same place we’ve always been; except everything is moving much too fast.
This is exactly the feeling I have. First: excessive growth of dependencies fueled by free components.
* with internet access to FOSS via sourceforge and github we got an abundance of building blocks
* with central repositories like CPAN, npm, pip, cargo and docker those building blocks became trivially easy to use
Then LLMs and agents added velocity to building apps and producing yet more components, feeding back into the dependency chain. Worse: new code with unattributed reuse of questionable patterns found in unknowable versions of existing libraries. That is, implicit dependencies on fragments multitude of packages.
This may all end well ultimately, but we're definitely in for a bumpy ride.
This assumes that there are no new exploits being generated.
We're seeing maintainers retreat from maintaining because the amount of AI slop being pushed at them is too much. How many are just going to hand over the maintenance burden to someone else, and how many of those new maintainers are going to be evil?
The essential problem is that our entire system of developing civilisation-critical software depends on the goodwill of a limited set of people to work for free and publish their work for everyone else to use. This was never sustainable, or even sensible, but because it was easy we based everything on it.
We need to solve the underlying problem: how to sustainably develop and maintain the software we need.
A large part of this is going to have to be: companies that use software to generate profits paying part of those profits towards the development and maintenance of that software. It just can't work any other way. How we do this is an open question that I have no answers for.
That is already how it works. The loner hacker in moms basement working for free on his super critical OSS package is largely a myth. The vast majority of OSS code is contributed by companies paying their employees to work on it.
I'm thinking of projects like curl [0]
this is a cornerstone of modern software development. If it died, or if got taken over by a malicious entity, every single company on the planet would have an immediate security problem. Yet the experience of that maintainer is bad verging on terrible [1].
We need to do better than this.
[0] https://curl.se/docs/governance.html
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/1034966/
>As an example, he put up a slide listing the 47 car brands that use curl in their products; he followed it with a slide listing the brands that contribute to curl. The second slide, needless to say, was empty.
>He emphasized that he has released curl under a free license, so there is no legal problem with what these companies are doing. But, he suggested, these companies might want to think a bit more about the future of the software they depend on.
There is little reason for minimal-restriction licenses to exist other than to allow corporate use without compensation or contribution. I would think by now that any hope that they would voluntarily be any less exploitative than they can would have been dashed.
If you aren't getting paid or working purely for your own benefit, use a protective license. Though, if thinly veiled license violation via LLM is allowed to stand, this won't be enough.
There is a lot of opposition in the FOSS community for restrictive/protective licenses. And to be fair, this comes from a consistent and entirely logical worldview.
There's a bunch of problems with getting companies to pay for this, too - that sense of entitlement (or even contractual obligation), the ability to control the project with cash, etc.
I don't have any answers or solutions. But I don't think we can hand-wave the problem away.
The problem is that they get away too easily with bugs in their products they ship to customers. If this would come with some penalties, there would be some incentive to invest in security and this would probably often flow back to upstream projects.
Like a money-back guarantee?
Like you get when you buy e.g. MS products?
/s
I am not talking about the open-source projects, but the downstream products such as cars that integrate curl.
The sad truth about open source in 2026 is that it does not serve the society the way it is advertised or did back in the 90s.
How so? We have open source operating systems running on a whole sleuth of systems ages apart. Interesting ideas and open collaboration coming out of the OS world.
This opposed to closed off “products” that change at the whims of the company owning it.
Statistically. Most of it is created to serve marketing, personal or other agenda needs and is sponsored through the corresponding means for it.
There’s a lot of misconception about how the open source comes to be and very small part, still significant of course, of it was really created for the benefit of a community. There are exceptions, but dig the organisational culture and origins and you’ll see the pattern. Also, thousands of projects are made for the satisfaction of the author himself being highly intelligent and high on algorithmic dopamine.
There is an xkcd about that i think
Faults are injected into the code at a constant rate per developer. Then there's the intentional injections.
Auto-installing random software is the problem. It was a problem when our parents did it, why would it be a good idea for developers to do it?
This is related to a massive annoyance of mine: when I run a piece of software and the system is missing a required dependency, I want the software to *tell me* that dependency is missing so I can make a decision about proceeding or not. Instead it seems that far too often software authors will try and be “clever” by silently installing a bunch of dependencies, either in some directory path specific to the software, or even worse globally.
I run a distro that often causes software like this to break because their silent automatic installation typically makes assumptions about Linux systems which don’t apply to mine. However I fear for the many users of most typical distros (and other OS’ in general as it’s not just a Linux-only issue) who are subject to having all sorts of stuff foisted onto their system with little to no opportunity to easily decide what is being heaped upon them.
Ruby gems and CPAN have build scripts that rebuild stuff on the user's device (and warn you if they can't find a dependency). But I believe one of the Python's tools that started the trend of downloading binaries instead of building them. Or was it NPM?
curl ... | sudo bash
yolo!
What we are seeing so far come out of the AI agent era is reduced not increased code quality. The few advances are by far negated by all the slop that's thrown around and that's unlikely to change.
> any useful piece of software has been fuzz tested, property tested and formally verified.
That would require effort. Human effort and extra token cost. Not going to happen, people want to rather move fast an break things.
Isn't blaming AI for that similar to blaming C for buffer overflows?
More people are producing more code because of easier tools. Most code is bad. But that's not the tools fault.
And in the end it is a problem of processes and culture.
We are not in disagreement here. I'm not blaming AI, I'm blaming the culture around its use.
Will need those animal bones if all the industrial control systems get turned against us
Nuclear might be airgapped but what about water, power…?
My pet theory is that package managers will one day be seen like we see object-oriented programming today. As something that was once popular but that we've since grown out of. It's also a design flaw that I see in cargo/Rust. Having to import 3rd party packages with who-knows-what dependencies to do pretty much anything, from using async to parsing JSON, it's supply chain vulnerability baked into the language philosophy. npm is no better, but I'm mentioning Rust specifically because it's an otherwise security-conscious language.
The industry hasn't grown out of OOP. Go look at any major production codebase businesses rely on and it's fully of objects and classes, including new codebases made very recently.
Package managers aren't going anywhere. Even languages that historically bet on large standard libraries have been giving up on that over time (e.g. Java's stdlib comes with XML support but not JSON).
Unfortunately, LLMs are also not cheap enough to just create whole new PL ecosystems from scratch. So we have to focus on the lowest hanging fruits here. That means making sandboxing and containers far more available and easy for developers. Nobody should run "npm install" outside a sandbox.
Rust is quite bad on this, having to rely on external crates for error handling or macros is even worse than what async runtime to pick up.
Yes, I mean crates like anyerror and syn.
But you can't expect the language std to supply you with every package under the sun.
A stdlib doesn't have to provide everything under the sun in order to be helpful here.
Languages with rich standard libraries provide enough common components that it's feasible to build things using only a small handful of external dependencies. Each of those can be carefully chosen, monitored, and potentially even audited, by an individual or small team.
That doesn't make the resulting software exploit-proof, of course, but it seems to me much less risky than an ecosystem where most programs pull in hundreds of dependencies, all of which receive far less scrutiny than a language's standard library.
I don't have an answer what the alternative is going to look like. But smarter people than me may find something. C/C++ are doing fine without package managers. Go at least has a more capable standard library than Rust. But I'm not sure if Go's import github approach is the answer.
One idea I've been entertaining is to not allow transitive imports in packages. It would probably lead to far fewer and more capable packages, and a bigger standard library. Much harder to imagine a left-pad incident in such an ecosystem.
> Go at least has a more capable standard library than Rust.
Many Golang projects I see in the wild will import a number of dependencies with significant feature overlap with sections of the standard library, or even be intended as a replacement for them. So it seems that having an expansive stdlib isn’t sufficient to avoid deep dependency trees, it probably helps to some degree but it’s definitely not a panacea.
The solution exists, and those are curated package repositories as we have in Linux distributions. In C I can simply install a -dev package and use some library which sees some quality control and security updates from the distribution.
The problem is that the UNIX shell model got very successful and is now also used on other platforms with poor package management, so all the language-level packaging system were created instead. But those did not learn from the lessons of Linux distributions. Cargo is particularly bad.
In C and C++'s case, the batteries included is POSIX + Khronos.
>C/C++ are doing fine without package managers.
They're not either, every one of these projects contains a gigantic vendor/ folder full of unmaintained libraries, modified so much that keeping up with the latest changes is impossible so they're stuck with whatever version they copied back in 2009.
I've been wanting a capability based security model for years. Argued about it here in fact. Capabilities are kind of an object pointer with associated permissions - like a unix file descriptor.
We should have:
- OS level capabilities. Launched programs get passed a capability token from the shell (or wherever you launched the program from). All syscalls take a capability as the first argument. So, "open path /foo" becomes open(cap, "/foo"). The capability could correspond to a fake filesystem, real branch of your filesystem, network filesystem or really anything. The program doesn't get to know what kind of sandbox it lives inside.
- Library / language capabilities. When I pull in some 3rd party library - like an npm module - that library should also be passed a capability too, either at import time or per callsite. It shouldn't have read/write access to all other bytes in my program's address space. It shouldn't have access to do anything on my computer as if it were me! The question is: "What is the blast radius of this code?" If the library you're using is malicious or vulnerable, we need to have sane defaults for how much damage can be caused. Calling lib::add(1, 2) shouldn't be able to result in a persistent compromise of my entire computer.
SeL4 has fast, efficient OS level capabilities. Its had them for years. They work great. They're fast - faster than linux in many cases. And tremendously useful. They allow for transparent sandboxing, userland drivers, IPC, security improvements, and more. You can even run linux as a process in sel4. I want an OS that has all the features of my linux desktop, but works like SeL4.
Unfortunately, I don't think any programming language has the kind of language level capabilities I want. Rust is really close. We need a way to restrict a 3rd party crate from calling any unsafe code (including from untrusted dependencies). We need to fix the long standing soundness bugs in rust. And we need a capability based standard library. No more global open() / listen() / etc. Only openat(), and equivalents for all other parts of the OS.
If LLMs keep getting better, I'm going to get an LLM to build all this stuff in a few years if nobody else does it first. Security on modern desktop operating systems is a joke.
Capabilities have a lot of serious design problems which is why no mainstream language has them. Because this comes up so often on HN I wrote an essay explaining the issues here:
https://blog.plan99.net/why-not-capability-languages-a8e6cbd...
But as pointed out by others, this particular exploit wouldn't be stopped by capabilities. Nor would it be stopped by micro-kernels. The filesystem is a trusted entity on any OS design I'm familiar with as it's what holds the core metadata about what components have what permissions. If you can exploit the filesystem code, you can trivially obtain any permission. That the code runs outside of the CPU's supervisor mode means nothing.
The only techniques we have to stop bugs like this are garbage collection or use of something like Rust's affine type system. You could in principle write a kernel in a language like C#, Java or Kotlin and it would be immune to these sorts of bugs.
Note that capabilities would not help for those bugs we are discussing today.
Those exploits are in kernel, and the userspace is only calling the normal, allowed calls. Removing global open()/listen()/etc.. with capability-based versions would still allow one to invoke the same kernel bugs.
(Now, using microkernel like seL4 where the kernel drivers are isolated _would_ help, but (1) that's independent from what userspace does, you can have POSIX layer with seL4 and (2) that would be may more context switches, so a performance drop)
> Note that capabilities would not help for those bugs we are discussing today.
Yes they would. Copyfail uses a bug in the linux kernel to write to arbitrary page table entries. A kernel like SeL4 puts the filesystem in a separate process. The kernel doesn't have a filesystem page table entry that it can corrupt.
Even if the bug somehow got in, the exploit chain uses the page table bug to overwrite the code in su. This can be used to get root because su has suid set. In a capability based OS, there is no "su" process to exploit like this.
A lot of these bugs seem to come from linux's monolithic nature meaning (complex code A) + (complex code B) leads to a bug. Microkernels make these sort of problems much harder to exploit because each component is small and easier to audit. And there's much bigger walls up between sections. Kernel ALG support wouldn't have raw access to overwrite page table entries in the first place.
> (2) that would be may more context switches, so a performance drop
I've heard this before. Is it actually true though? The SeL4 devs claim the context switching performance in sel4 is way better than it is in linux. There are only 11 syscalls - so optimising them is easier. Invoking a capability (like a file handle) in sel4 doesn't involve any complex scheduler lookups. Your process just hands your scheduler timeslice to the process on the other end of the invoked capability (like the filesystem driver).
But SeL4 will probably have more TLB flushes. I'm not really sure how expensive they are on modern silicon.
I'd love to see some real benchmarks doing heavy IO or something in linux and sel4. I'm not really sure how it would shake out.
Have you heard of pledge in OpenBSD?
I prefer it’s model of declaring this is what I want to use, any calls to code outside that error out.
Yes. But its nowhere near as powerful as capabilities.
- Pledge requires the program drop privileges. Process level caps move the "allowed actions" outside of an application. And they can do that without the application even knowing. This would - for example - let you sandbox an untrusted binary.
- Pledge still leaves an entire application in the same security zone. If your process needs network and disk access, every part of the process - including 3rd party libraries - gets access to the network and disk.
- You can reproduce pledge with caps very easily. Capability libraries generally let you make a child capability. So, cap A has access to resources x, y, z. Make cap B with access to only resource x. You could use this (combined with a global "root cap" in your process) to implement pledge. You can't use pledge to make caps.
I’m not trying to say use pledge/unveil to make capabilities, I’m saying use pledge/unveil to limit exposure.
To me it’s easier to get a program to let the system know what it needs vs. try to contain it from the outside.
Anyway, have a good one.
Most people will avoid sticking things in their mouth by default. They don't wait for the microbial cultures to come back positive to say no.
We need a cultural shift toward code hygiene, which isn't really any different from the norms most cultures develop around food. It's a mix of crude heuristics but the sense of "eeew" is keeping billions of people alive.
The billions of burgers served by fast food franchises with long histories of poisoning people would argue that delicious convenience overrides the hygiene instinct.
Which is to say: Hiding the sausage-making is a core aspect of what makes supply chains profitable.
> They don't wait for the microbial cultures to come back positive to say no.
They dont wait for the cultures to come back negative to say yes either. They just eat what they are served.
Most people start out as kids that does exactly that.
And kids do not decide what to buy and how to prefer that food for exactly that reason.
That means going back to disabling Javascript or only allowing widely used, well-maintained Javascript libraries.
> or only allowing widely used, well-maintained Javascript libraries.
That isn't a guarantee either, just last month someone compromised the Axios library.
They stole the axios's npm keys and they uploaded malicious artifacts. They did not takeover the axios's repo. The issue is with packaging and distribution, not with code.
Indeed - one year ago we floated the idea it is better to write your code if you can, than get third parties. But it was a heresy at the time to consider LLMm filling the gaps.
Today I’m limiting the exposure to dependencies more than ever, and particularly for things that take few hundred lines to implement. It’s a paradigm shift, no less.
This replaces supply chain trust with the trust in the LLM and the provider you're using. Even if you exclude model devs from your threat model and are running the LLM yourself, it's still an uninterpretable black box that is trained on the web data which can be and is manipulated precisely to attack LLMs during training. So this approach still needs proper supply chain security.
Well it needs, and in particular if you use an adversarial model tuned to inject malware. Not sure if it was researched though to this degree and no provider would tell you anyways I guess :)
There are a lot of libs you really can't justify implementing from scratch. Mathjs and node-mysql jump to mind. Poisoned chains build up from small dependencies, and clearly staying on top of your dependency chain should be a full time job - if anyone was willing to pay someone to do that full time.
Of course, and thank God for them. But many more look more complicated and serve more use case than you typically actually need. Like - how much of ffmpeg you need, well depends on the project. And perhaps someone is happily tearing it down with LLM to get precisely these parts (not me, though I enjoy doing it to LLMs and other models).
But being able to have agents implement pelr5 in rust and make it faster and more secure raises many questions towards the role of open source and consequences of security and supply chain risks.
I am feeling really uncomfortable sitting on a large React project.
Whether to do constant npm upgrades to keep the high-priority security issues count at zero (for what seems like about 15 minutes), or whether to hang back a bit to avoid catching the big one that everyone knows is coming real soon now.
Not enjoying npm at all.
Realistically, most folks don't get paid to mitigate long term risks by deviation from the common (and more efficient) practice.
Big companies have security roles on multiple levels, enforcing policies and not allowing devs to just install any package. That's not new but started maybe 15 years ago.
Right, yeah, instead you can run ancient versions of everything and encounter a whole different class of risks
That's not at all what OP is talking about.
I am so happy to go through another round of kernel RPMs after the freak out today!
I have one server that has shell users, and I did the "yum update" and "reboot -f" dance last week.
Was that good enough? Oh no.
Here we go again!
Fortunately the issue isn’t fixed yet, so you don’t have to :)
Thinks might have to start considering server side technologies a bit more if at least being mindful of build processes.
It's not just client-side npm though. Rust has the same problem.
Edit: and, ofc, what we're discussing here is Linux packages.
I am feasting on Schadenfreude as SWEs industry grapples with the messes it made and an uncertain employability in the near future; AI is not 30 years away like when I started.
All the arrogant asocial coder bros cast aside.
All the poorly reasoned shortcuts due to hustle culture and "git pull the world" engineering, startups aura farm on Twitter/social media about their cool sweatshop labor exploiting tech jobs...
Watching AI come around and the 2010s messes blow up in faces... chefs kiss
Hey it's all web-scale though! Good job!
Considering the amount of money at stake, Software is a deeply, deeply unserious and careless industry, and a great many practitioners are also deeply unserious and careless people. Yet, somehow the world goes on, these companies siphon up money, and all harms they cause are externalized.
> Considering the amount of money at stake, Software is a deeply, deeply unserious and careless industry, and a great many practitioners are also deeply unserious and careless people.
What else do you expect, given the economic incentives on one side, and the immaturity of the discipline on the other? Writing robust software requires time, money and competence, in a purely empirical approach, since we have no fundamental theory of software. The pressure is for quantity and features in minimum time. The approaches are incompatible, and economics win every time.
Well yeah; data breaches been a thing forever. Physical reality never opened a black hole in San Fran because someone committed a key to Github or a box of tapes destined for Iron Mountain vanished. A lot of the concerns are themselves social paranoias not real concerns.
Which is where the unserious emerges but in a subtle way; taking such unserious things so seriously is not serious behavior. It's anxious and paranoid, aloof and clueless behavior.
Secure in tech skills but unserious otherwise.
Lacking a broad set of skills will make office workers unable to grow a potato inherently paranoid about their job.
IT is (was?) one of the very few ways for us in third-world countries to pull ourselves out of poverty by our own bootstraps, since social mobility is quite limited if you lack the right connections. I'm pleased with you being so happy about it being taken away to make more money for billionaires.
AI was the goal all along; it's not even a secret. Papers on self learning computers go back decades.
It was merely untenable due to hardware limits and now outdated software development patterns.
Big data SaaS companies were never the end goal. They were a stepping stone to AI. A lab to test AI theory.
So your runway and moat so to speak were never real. Merely temporary science research.
I don't think the wealth should go to billionaires. Nor do I think your life should be spent dancing like a monkey to their organ, while you convince yourself to soothe the soul its for a greater good.
Perhaps your country should engage in substance collective action. Because this whole time you were just a pawn of billionaires who don't know you exist. As such they never cared about providing you assurances. You were just cheaper labor.
This is a baffling take.. These exploits are local privilege escalations for linux systems. They'll allow an attacker with a foothold in a shared environment or with low privilege access to a system to affect the rest of the system. They aren't RCEs and won't let attackers access environments that they couldn't before other than the shared hosting scenarios. That is absolutely not how most supply chain attacks are carried out. Most supply chain attacks are performed via credential theft and social engineering. The more sophisticated ones are APT style attacks like the Solarwinds one (which were carried out by organisations that would already have exploits like these) or more creative stuff like the Shai-Hulud fiasco. All of these options existed before these LPEs. If you're worried about supply chain attacks you've been worried for longer than Mythos has been out. Not updating your software is never good security advice.
The supply chain attack in this case, would be injecting the exploit on a ci/cd system and escalating the local user who runs the npm code to root.
The proper response from them and you, should be to make sure to have some isolatin between user space and root like gvisor.
Either my reading of your comment is wrong or you misunderstood the supply chain comment by OP I think: what they mean is that a supply chain attack that gets the exploit on a system would be great now because the reported vulns are unfixed pretty much everywhere
No, you read it right. I just misunderstood the post's message as "these exploits will enable more supply chain attacks". I'll probably delete my comment since it's debating a strawman. It is absolutely right that these exploits might enable these attacks to have a larger impact. I still don't think that I agree with the message since a malicious npm package already installed can get its payloads from a C2 server, it doesn't need an npm update.
yeah but i mean installing an npm package in a container is giving it low privilege access
So what do we do? Pin our dependencies (to hashes when possible), and only update when there are CVEs?
But problem is this could lead to abuse of the CVE system to try to force rapid adoption of attacked packages. What prevents this?
Nothing :D
Linux distributions do not need Copy Fail to get root access:
attack on next sudo call, shows data accessible only to root.Our security model based on distributions verifying packages, that is distro maintainers. Software we can't trust should be running in VMs. Attack on trivy is just the beginning and solution is removing pip, uv, npm, rbenv from host, running in docker containers:
long term environments defined in docker compose: switch to Kata etc if more protection needed. Eventually all userspace would run in VMs.If you are on Linux that is.
"Wait a week to install software" does not work. Just a few months ago a massive exploit hit the web, which was a timed attack which sat for more than a month before executing. If everyone starts waiting a week, their exploits will wait 2 weeks. Cyber criminals do not need to exploit you immediately, they just need to exploit you. (It also doesn't change a large range of vuln classes like typosquatting)
I think the author was suggesting "wait a week" as a one-time wait for fixes to be written and patches distributed for these specific prematurely-disclosed vulnerabilities, not an on-going suggestion for delaying all updates. But otherwise I agree with you.
Yep, that was my intent.
Oh! Not GP but skimmed too quickly
> If everyone starts waiting a week, their exploits will wait 2 weeks
It's much easier to break into an NPM/Github account and push malicious commits in the few hours a maintainer is sleeping than it is to push something out and not have it noticed for 2 weeks.
There are lists of attacks which had an exposure window which was much shorter than 2 weeks:
https://daniakash.com/posts/simplest-supply-chain-defense/ https://blog.yossarian.net/2025/11/21/We-should-all-be-using...
I think you misunderstood the article. The proposal isn't wait a week after Software has been published before installing it. It's in the next seven days starting now, just don't, because you probably don't have patches for these vulnerabilities and even if you do there's probably more scary vulnerabilities about to be discovered.
I think it's even more specific.
From TFA:
> Right now would be one of the best times for a supply chain attack via NPM to hit hard.
Given the local kernel root exploits, people pulling npm dependencies have an extra high chance of getting rooted. This includes test systems, build systems, the web server running node.js backend, etc. etc. etc.
This means that there is a significantly greater chance that whatever software you download (not necessarily npm-based) on the internet in these couple days has been unknowingly infected with backdoors, simply due to the fact that the vast majority of servers out there that use npm code have easily exploitable vulnerabilities.
well then let's wait a month or even two months. The point of the wait period is primarily to avoid the new installation of exploits, not the execution of already installed exploits.
Yeah, Stuxnet was dormant for a year until execution.
A popular package has more exposure. When the artefact is published, the entire world can see it. Hopefully some people check the diff between versions. But without any delays then you could be hit by exploits nobody has seen yet.
Every dependency compromise that I can remember "in the past few months" were discovered in hours, if not minutes (litllm, axios, bitwarden CLI, Checkmarx docker images, Pytorch lightning, intercom/intercom-php). What's more, the discovery of these compromises did not at all rely on whether the compromises were actively used.
That's why I don't understand:
> If everyone starts waiting a week, their exploits will wait 2 weeks
This is why cooldowns have space for patches.
Alternatively, switch to an operating system like FreeBSD which doesn't take a YOLO approach to security. Security fixes don't just get tossed into the FreeBSD kernel without coordination; they go through the FreeBSD security team and we have binary updates (via FreeBSD Update, and via pkgbase for 15.0-RELEASE) published within a couple minutes of the patches hitting the src tree. (Roughly speaking, a few seconds for the "I've pushed the patches" message to go out on slack, 10-30 seconds for patches to be uploaded, and up to a minute for mirrors to sync).
I'm somewhat skeptical here, because I notified the FreeBSD security team of a vulnerability a few years ago, and I never got a response, even after a follow-up email a few weeks later. To be fair, my report was about a non-core component, and the vulnerability wouldn't be very easy to exploit, but Debian, OpenBSD, SUSE, and Gentoo all patched it within a week [0].
That being said, I'm not suggesting that anyone should judge an entire OS based off of how they handle a single minor report, since everything else that I've seen suggests that FreeBSD takes security reports quite seriously. But then you could also use this same argument for the Linux kernel bug, since it's pretty rare for a patch to be mismanaged like this there too :)
[0]: https://www.maxchernoff.ca/p/luatex-vulnerabilities#timeline
Linux Kernel doesn’t differentiate between security bugs and other bugs, which is the main complaint here I think. They have the same process.
So the issue is bigger than the mishandling of a single issue, it’s a fundamental process issue around security for one of the most impactful projects in the entire space.
If you are switching to a BSD for security reasons, why FreeBSD? Isn't OpenBSD the super secure one? Sorry, it's been a while since I've looked at those projects
The person suggesting FreeBSD is a FreeBSD developer (Colin Percival - actually according to Wikipedia FreeBSD engineering lead), would be weird for him to suggest openbsd.
I'm reminded of another legendary HN thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
Also hilarious to see Drew Houston responding a bit later on the same thread:
> we're in a similar space -- http://www.getdropbox.com (and part of the yc summer 07 program) basically, sync and backup done right (but for windows and os x). i had the same frustrations as you with existing solutions.
> let me know if it's something you're interested in, or if you want to chat about it sometime.
>drew (at getdropbox.com)
It may well have been your point, but that it's the exact same person makes this even better
I haven't switched to BSD but I've been thinking about it for a while. I just saw Vultr has both FreeBSD and OpenBSD!
FreeBSD didn’t have user land ASLR until 2019 and, amongst other mitigations, still doesn’t have kASLR. It’s not a serious operating system for people who care about security. If you want FreeBSD and security take Shawn Webb’s HardenedBSD.
Last I read, ASLR is a good thing to have, but overall is usually not difficult to defeat. It's a speed bump, not a brick wall.
I don't think it's reasonable to say that an OS that lacks it isn't "serious" about security.
>Last I read, ASLR is a good thing to have, but overall is usually not difficult to defeat.
For local attackers there may be easier avenues to leak the ASLR slide, but for remote attackers it's almost universally agreed it significantly raises the bar.
>I don't think it's reasonable to say that an OS that lacks it isn't "serious" about security.
When they implemented it in 2019 it had been an 18-year-old mitigation. If you are serious about security, you implement everything that raises the bar. The term "defense-in-depth" exists for a reason, and ASLR is probably one of the easiest and most effective defense-in-depth measures you can implement that doesn't necessarily require changes from existing code other than compiling with -pie.
Is there anywhere that provides a good overview of the various OS protection technologies/approaches that exist and which OSes have implemented them?
So you have one example in hand and trash talked FreeBSD’s entire security team. Bold claims are fine but this is lazy.
FreeBSD isn’t secure, I suspect you’re sitting on a pile of 0 days for it?
Ask yourself why Mythos was so easily able to develop a remote STACK buffer overflow vulnerability.
Define "so easily"?
They exploited a linear stack buffer overflow. Not a write-what-where or arb write. A linear stack buffer overflow in 2026! There are at least two distinct failures there:
1. No strong stack protectors.
2. No kASLR.
That's 20-year-old exploit methodology.
FreeBSD is quite lax when it comes to security- especially defaults and configs.
The preference is for usability over security.
Famously: https://vez.mrsk.me/freebsd-defaults
I appreciate your work on the project, but I can’t in good conscience suggest people switch while are such bad defaults.
There’s always a guy. It’s great that your favorite distro is definitely safer. An order of magnitude fewer exploits will mean only a few thousand or so, I suppose. Ozymandis used Gentoo.
Calling FreeBSD "just a distro" is verging on insulting. It's an operating system.
Well, as they're a FreeBSD dev, I would be surprised if they pointed anyone in a different direction.
FreeBSD is not a distro. It's not even Linux; it's a completely different kernel and operating system that traces back to even before Linux. It's honestly closer to Darwin than it is to Linux; macOS is technically a BSD. (Not FreeBSD though.)
Darwin is its own thing really. There are parts from BSD, there are also parts from Mach and there are also unique parts.
FreeBSD is not a distro
What does the D in BSD stand for again?
Distribution. Which is a different word than distro, with a different meaning. Like smart and smartass.
Distribution. But it’s not a Linux distribution.
Been constructing a lot of infrastructure servers recently, almost all of them FreeBSD VMs running under bhyve on FreeBSD physical hosts. It's a very simple, clean, pleasant environment to work in. And they all run tarsnap. ;-)
Also funny they never show Debian in those tests/videos.
Debian is probably the best of all the Linuxes, but still suffers from split-brain: If patches are sent upstream first, Debian can't start digesting them until they're already public.
With FreeBSD there's never any question of "who should this get reported to".
> Debian can't start digesting them until they're already public
Not sure what you mean by this. Debian is able to handle coordinated disclosures (when they're actually coordinated), and get embargoed security updates out rapidly without breaking the embargo.
Is there some other aspect of this that you're referencing?
The key words there are "when they're actually coordinated". Debian doesn't own the Linux kernel, and the kernel developers don't bother with coordinated disclosure, so the happy path of coordinated disclosure only happens when reporters make the non-obvious choice of reporting vulnerabilities to people other than the maintainers.
Fair enough; yeah, at the point where the embargo failed, it was important that patches get to distros as fast as possible in order to ship the fixes.
The fact that the kernel security team has decided coordinating disclosure is someone else's problem so it happens inconsistently.
How so?
Has everyone here already forgotten about the WireGuard tire fire?
https://lwn.net/Articles/850098
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26507507
tl;dr: deeply insecure WireGuard implementation committed directly into the FreeBSD kernel with zero review.
Was this process problem fixed?
While I am sure FreeBSD is more secure than your average Linux distro, I sure hope they are using these new AI models to harden everything.
Only to be thrown out of the windows with a plain "curl | sh".
curl | sh is more prevalent in Linux where you can expect a stable ABI from the kernel and sometimes GNU libc. No such things in BSD land. Packages are built against a release always. They don't maintain binary compatibility.
Hardly an argument against random shell scripts execution, quite often elevated.
Not everyone installs only what is available in pkgsrc.
FreeBSD just slaps at the problem. OpenBSD solves it.
I kid, I kid...
There's already an okay solution to supply-chain attacks against dependency managers like npm, PyPI, and Cargo: set them to only install package versions that are more than a few days old. The recent high-profile attacks were all caught and rolled back within a day, so doing this would have let you safely avoid the attacks. It really should be the default behavior. Let self-selected beta testers and security scanner companies try out the newest versions of packages for a day before you try them. Instructions: https://cooldowns.dev/
More a case for something like this from Show HN three months ago
https://github.com/artifact-keeper
An artifact manager. Only get what you approve. So you can get fast updates when needed and consistently known stable when you need it. Does need a little config override - easy work.
I had my own janky tooling for something like it. This is a good project.
Does that really scale well? Thanks to cascading dependencies, even a medium sized project can import hundreds of dependencies. Can a developer really review them all to figure out if they are safe and that there's not security fix that was fixed in a newer version of the package?
Yes, that is what is required. Every dependency needs an internal owner and reviewer. Every change needs to be reviewed and brought into the internal repository.
If no one is willing to stand up and say "yes this is safe and of acceptable quality", why use it?
It's a software engineering version of the professional engineering stamp.
I love the sibling response from @jp...
Also, IME we don't deep dive everything (should we?)
For most stuff we make sure the latest is not-shit and passed test cases. We do have ceremony around version bumps.
Even better, only use company vetted repos, everyone is forbidded to install directly from the Internet repos.
This naturally doesn't work outside corporations.
So you get security updates late too? Many vulnerabilities are in the wild for years before being noticed, and patched.
Once noticed, that's where the exploit explosion erupts, excited exploiters everywhere, emboldened... enticed... excessively encouraged, by your delayed updates.
Presumably npm exempts security updates from its minimum release age, but even if it doesn't, I think the times where you need an important security update are relatively rare enough that handling the real cases on a case-by-case basis with whitelisting is fine. Outside of Next.js's React2Shell vulnerability last year, I'm not sure I've ever had a security update of a dependency written in a memory-safe language (ie. not C/C++) which I've installed through npm/PyPI/Cargo that patched a security vulnerability that had been making my application exploitable to others in practice. Almost all security vulnerabilities I've personally seen flagged through npm are about things I only use at build-time and are only relevant if a user can create and pass an arbitrary object to the function, which is rarely the case. Most security vulnerabilities I've encountered and fixed in working on web apps were things like XSS, SQL injections, and improperly enforced permissions, and they nearly always happened in the application's own code rather than inside a dependency.
> exempts security updates from its minimum release age
If it does, doesn't that defeat the purpose? If a package is compromised, of course the compromiser will just label their new version as a "security update".
At least with our Renovate config, all dependencies have a 7 day cooldown, but marked security updates are immediate.
Attackers can’t push a security update without going through the reporting process (e.g. Github CVE), so they can’t necessarily abuse that easily.
You could still have security bumps happening (like dependabot).
IMO, the most sustainable version is either the linux distros/bsd ports/homebrew models. You don't push new libraries to the public registry, instead you write a packaging script that gets reviewed for every new changes.
Another model is Perl's CPAN where you publish source files only.
Trust me, as someone who has contributed to such a package set, almost nobody is inspecting diffs between upstream versions when updating a package. Only the package definitions themselves are reviewed, but they are typically only version + hash bumps.
Reviewing upstream diffs for every package requires a lot of man hours and most packagers are volunteers. I guess LLMs might help catching some obvious cases.
Not really talking about upstream. Most supply attacks I’ve heard about are stolen secrets and artifacts uploading. They’re not about repositories or websites being taken over. As the packaging scripts are often in repos, you detect easily if people are trying to update where upstream points to.
I think what we have to start accepting even security experts is that our world is incredibly fragile. I think people realy understimate this. And I do not mean just the IT world but the entire world is built on many incredibly fragile balances. Security Exploits will always exist. Not just in software but in real life. Heck someone managed to Sneak into a Security Conference. And that guy was a random youtuber. Granted that was not like a high security thing. But thats just an example I had of the top of my head. Basically it is realy easy to circumvent security in most cases.
What I want to say with that is fundamentally our world works because atleast most people do not abuse shit. That is fundamentally how human society has always worked, and will likely continue to do so.
I remember there was a trend with some UK Influencers using some "Ladder and a High-vis" tricks to enter places for a while to show how rough physical security is [0]. I believe its the youtuber, Max Fosh, who managed to do it back to back at the International Security Expo, first in the UK [1] and then in the US [2], with the fake names 'Rob Banks' and 'Nick Everything'.
I've studied security culture before and in most cases everything comes down to a sliding scale with security on one side and convenience/accessibility on the other, the more secure something is, the less accessible it is and vice versa.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTI0SeyhAPA
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM3imMiERdU
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmgLwxK8TvA
"Don't update your systems for a while" is exactly what an attacker would say.
If you can't trust your update sources, you have bigger problems.
If I'm being really frank, are system updates not more disruptive, destructive and result in more data loss and downtime than all the attacks you'll experience in your lifetime? (unless you're a high value business target ofc, I'm talking for personal machines)
In my book, having unattended-upgrades or windows update run amok on your system is functionally worse than a rootkit.
This. Lost hours from the hours running the updates, lost hours from the occasional faulty upgrade, and every now and again it's fail spectacularly and need a restore from backup to return to productivity. No matter if it's Ubuntu LTS or non-LTS, every six months there's always something radically changed. OpenSUSE Leap has the same problem. I'm looking at Tumbleweed but a new version every week is going to break occasionally. Gentoo build-from-source is going to have weirdness every now and again, if not utter ruin. MacOS updates yearly, and brings horrors with every point zero release. Windows is Windows, and those problems are well known. I don't think there's a way around it with the current offerings.
It's a problem we have to live with for the sake of progress and for security updates. Every machine needs downtime for maintenance on a periodic, often-scheduled basis. It might cost time but avoiding updates is not a good plan.
Aside from dodgy updates that have to run as root to install, if you have passwordless sudo it's more dangerous than any broken package or local-only privilege escalation exploit. I'll wager many have it set up that way, because typing passwords is tiresome.
For the newer players who have gotten into continuous integration and containerized builds, consider checking on your systems to be sure you're not pulling 'latest' across a bunch of packages with every build.
We set up our base containers with all the external dependencies already in them and then only update those explicitly when we decide it's time.
This means we might be a bit behind the bleeding edge, but we're also taking on a lot less risk with random supply chain vulns getting instant global distribution.
You'll also find your CI build times and flakey failures can be cut down massively by doing this.
Additionally, use only internal repos.
Can someone help me understand the copyfail thing and how it relates to NPM packages?
Edit: I think I understand. copyfail is a kernel bug that lets a malicious npm package get root access on your Linux server, right?
So now, while there are unpatched servers, is when it would be the perfect time for attackers to target NPM packages.
And the advice isn't just "update your kernel" because we are still finding new related issues?
NPM supply-chain attacks spread really quickly.
If a popular NPM package was compromised and included a copy.fail exploit, it would make lots of systems vulnerable to root privilege escalation.
> And the advice isn't just "update your kernel" because we are still finding new related issues?
The advice isn't just "update your kernel" because there is no update. The latest vulnerability (the one discovered after copy.fail) still has no fix.
The patches for the latest vulnerabilities aren’t even out yet. So it would be a real bad time for a new supply chain attack since it would get root on pretty much every system.
npm can run on linux.
Actively destructive opinion article. I could not begin to understand the rationale.
It takes 45 seconds to go check how old the copyfail and dirtyfrag vulnerabilities actually are. Which is longer than it takes to read TFA. Dirtyfrag may be relevant to systems from as far as 2017.
It's not "new" software being affected. And actual old software is in a much worse state because we had a lot more time to find their problems.
OP is suggesting that a supply chain attack would be bad now, and to reduce that risk by not installing/updating NPM packages.
This is why I avoid the entire JavaScript shitshow that is NPM and all that ecosystems nonsense. The population of users do not have the secondary considerations to be trusted, there will always be someone that does the worse and talks too many into following them. Then the "best practices" produce failures. What a shit show.
Literally implemented PR guards today to prevent the team merging any dependencies that didn’t have explicit versions pinned (and that matched the resolution in the lock file).
People lamented semver not being trustable but that ship sailed a long time ago, and supply chain attacks are going to get worse before they get better.
Our team is pretty minimal when it comes to enforced hooks (everyone has their own workflow) but no one could come up with an objection to this one.
Wouldn’t you prefer to pin to SHA hashes? Or does your package manager cloud-side ensure immutability of releases?
I'm holding off on upgrading to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS until we have a few months of experience with the new release. Canonical just had a huge DDOS attack, and there might have been other attacks hidden in all that traffic.
I saw a recent post about only adopting packages a certain number of days post release (say +3 days, or +7 days) after. The idea is you never bring in fresh commits, only older ones. This would need dangerous or bad commits to be marked vulnerable too.
It means you skip supply chain attacks but may miss fresh vulnerability patches too.
This applies to much more than just software, in fact it applies to almost everything.
I don't remember where I read it, but it basically boils down to need vs want.
I've used that rule for deciding between a new car or used. A fancy vacuum or basic.
A shiny new gadget.
Bringing new things into the tech stack.
Picking a new tech stack.
the lottery of either getting a new supply-chain attack or the fixes from Mythos with every single update
This gets me to ask whether I have been hacked . For a few weeks now, both my main mbp and iPhone have been showing unexpected hangs of 1-30 seconds. I can’t find out what’s causing it - not memory pressure, not cpu load.
I am worried that the sluggishness appeared about the same time on both devices
For ios, rebooting your phone is extremely effective at removing exploits. The boot chain attestation stuff can verify the system is in a known state. If you are ultra paranoid you could enable lockdown mode which preemptively disables the entrypoints for exploits. So far I don't believe there has been any exploit which works with lockdown mode enabled.
If you are already exploited though, I doubt it helps
Getting persistent root is actually quite difficult on mobile operating systems. iOS famously so, but unless you're running a custom ROM other than Graphene, Android has some solid protections as well.
Regular phone reboots are a security measure at this point.
It does though, the exploit exists in memory. When you reboot the phone the memory is reset, if it's modified system files, the checksums won't pass and your phone will refuse to boot. Requiring it to be wiped and reinstalled.
These days most exploits can not persist through a reboot due to secureboot and other bootchain attestations. In the boot process, everything loaded gets checksummed and compared to signed signatures from Apple, but this only helps at load time, not while the phone is running. Of course if the phone is not patched, the exploit could be reloaded, but this would require revising a malicious website or reopening a malicious bit of media.
It really pisses me off that responsible disclosure timelines are being ignored.
In this case, no insiders broke the embargo. It was reverse engineered from the patch by an unrelated third party and a proof of concept immediately came out of it. At that point, it's kinda fair game.
I assume that while Mythos may be really good at finding vulnerabilities, lighter models may still do a pretty good job of explaining/exploiting the vulnerability if given the patch which fixes it.
if you don't already consider responsible disclosure a quaint idea, you may want to grow warm on it
the idea that it exists at all is more or less a gentleman's agreement in the engineering world anyway
Less a gentleman's agreement and more of a question of economic incentives going away. Companies aren't paying out bounties at the rates they used to (possibly because they've realized there's little financial incentive to do so for most findings) and simultaneously they're being inundated with AI slop findings that somehow have to still be triaged and evaluated.
The dirty frag repo says:
> Because the responsible disclosure schedule and the embargo have been broken, no patch exists for any distribution.
I had to do a double take reading that. It’s written something happened and prevented them from following a schedule but seemingly they chose to release the information. I hope I’m missing something where it was forcibly disclosed elsewhere.
Edit: Moments later I refreshed the homepage and saw the announcement. They do claim to have consulted with maintainers
> Due to external factors, the embargo has been broken, so no patch exists for any distribution.
Very odd wording. I assume there’s an interesting/upsetting story here that will come out soon.
Presumably:
* https://github.com/V4bel/dirtyfrag/blob/master/assets/write-...
* https://github.com/V4bel/dirtyfrag/blob/master/assets/write-...
If the fix commit is public, so is the issue being fixed.
With copy.fail the security patch wasn't listed as such so there wasn't a lot of attention on the issue as it remained dormant in most kernels for a while.
I don't doubt that the patch reversal + exploit PoC made by a third party is the result of people figuring out how patches work in open source projects like these.
Anyone with access to a good enough LLM can scour through supposedly minor bug fixes that might hide a critical vulnerability rather than doing it all manually. The LLM will probably throw up tons of false positives and miss half the issues, it you only need one or two successes.
I got rid of half of my VSCode extensions a couple days ago, its too risky.
Those things scare the crap out of me…
Even worse are the “extension packs” that combine some normal things and one wonky thing nobody’s ever heard of…
Or disable algif_aead module as in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47957409
That's not enough in this case. The suggested mitigation according to the Dirty.Frag github page is to blacklist esp4, esp6 and rxrpc
Thanks.
Discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054182
At some point, some people will rebuild an entire stack (all layers, from OS to applications) with proof carrying code upgrades. Proof-code co-design and co-construction is the only way to execute code that you can trust.
The post is about Linux vulnerabilities, but given the recent supply chain attacks, I'd be especially careful with Homebrew: https://x.com/i/status/2052106143271354859
Often convenience and security are at odds, but `export HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1` is more convenient and more secure.
Problem here is Brew does things in an anti-unix way by default, the auto updating of packages being the prominent reason.
I personally switched away from macOS with this being one of the reasons, after having realized brew will eventually compromise my system with their antics.
Yes, and, for non-personal machines or anything connected to the internet: now is a great time to get good at rolling out patches and new releases quickly.
The proof of concept code is out before patches are available for any distro.
I wonder whether there is any tool that can prevent npm from downloading any package that has been published in the last month. While I miss out on possible fixes, this would prevent downloading some 3rd level dep that takes over my machine.
NPM seems to have introduced the flag `minimumReleaseAge` for this exact purpose. However even though are many recent references to it[0][1][2] I don't see it anywhere in the NPM documentation.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47513932
[1] https://github.com/npm/cli/issues/8570
[2] https://socket.dev/blog/npm-introduces-minimumreleaseage-and...
pnpm has this, I think others may also have something similar.
https://pnpm.io/settings#minimumreleaseage
pnpm has added a new setting, minimumReleaseAge, enabled by default, just to try to mitigate these issues.
Remember the whole discussion when UNIX was supposed to not need anti-virus and talking down PCs?
Behaviours matter more than OS security primitives.
The whole (mistaken) belief that Linux and macOS didn't require AV was based on the execute bit being present, something Microsoft fixed back in XP by making downloaded files as such and preventing them from being opened trivially.
If you have code execution, you can attack the OS.
Indeed, when one installs dependencies all over the Internet, or even better, key projects use "curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh" as default suggestion on how to install them, attackers have the work done for them.
> key projects use "curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh" as default suggestion
This is exactly why some (including me) don't take these projects seriously. Like you claim to design a language for security, and this is how you tell me to install it????
To mitigate supply chain attacks like this, I've taken to specifying exact versions in my Rust cargo.toml, and when importing new crates, select the previous-to-latest version. Is this a reasonable mitigation? It bugs me that Swift deprecates the concept of specifying exact versions, it actively pushes you towards semver which leaves the door open to this.
Maybe you should install new kernels at least though.
What if it's a really good bit?
Am I missing part of the article? This seems like 2 sentences saying "don't install anything cause some Linux LPEs came out." I don't understand why this is on the frontpage of HN.
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is its own area of risk that people often ignore
Except that a lot of software likely is already broken in fun ways we currently don't know about. That is what makes it such a "fun" challenge. Supply chain attacks are one thing, but CVEs in already released software allowing other attackers are another.
As always, I know most of us work in IT, but things rarely are actually binary.
You don't need a kernel LPE to root a Linux developer machine.
Just alias sudo to sudo-but-also-keep-password-and-execute-a-payload in ~/.bashrc and wait up to 24 hours. Maybe also simulate some breakage by intercepting other commands and force the user to run 'sudo systemctl' or something sooner rather than later.
this, this is something I don't understand there are a billion ways to gain root once you control the user that regulary uses sudo.
this is only scary for rootless containers as it skips an isolation layer, but we've started shipping distroless containers which are not vulnerable to this due to the fact that they lack priviledge escalation commands such as su or sudo.
never trust software to begin with, sandbox everything you can and don't run it on your machine to begin with if possible.
First, if you control the account of the administrator, you already have a worst case scenario. Second, this is why distros tell you to not use sudo. The purpose of sudo is to give some people the ability to run a very specific program with elevated privileges that wouldn't be allowed otherwise, while you don't want them to have any other administrative rights. If you want someone to be an admin over the system, just give them the root password.
I doubt your “distroless” container is any safer for this vulnerability .
Infecting sudo just makes for a quick demo.
If your container has different processes at different user ids, the exploit would still be effective.
It would likely also be able to “modify” read only files mapped from the host.
I agree that de facto the biggest security flaw in Linux is "okay I'm tired of getting interrupted all day assisting you, I know you're competent, I'll put you on the sudoers list."
But there are a lot of academic and research institutions that actually do have good Linux user management. I worked at a pediatric hospital, and the RHEL HPC admins did not mess around in terms of who was allowed to access which patients' data. As someone who was not an admin, it was a huge pain and it should have been. So this bug has pretty serious implications, seems like anyone at that hospital can abscond with a lot of deidentified data. [research HPC not as sensitive as the clinical stuff, which I think was all Windows Server]
I think we've concluded already that user isolation is not safe and shouldn't be trusted, that's why we've invested to hard into namespacing(containers). users should only have what they need if you really care about security and don't want to tolerate the overhead of virtualization based security.
> this, this is something I don't understand there are a billion ways to gain root once you control the user that regulary uses sudo.
I won't enter into all the details but... It's totally possible to not have the sudo command (or similar) on a system at all and to have su with the setuid bit off.
On my main desktop there's no sudo command there are zero binaries with the setuid bit set.
The only way to get root involves an "out-of-band" access, from another computer, that is not on the regular network [1].
This setup as worked for me since years. And years. And I very rarely need to be root on my desktop. When I do, I just use my out-of-band connection (from a tiny laptop whose only purpose is to perform root operations on my desktop).
For example today: I logged in as root blocked the three modules with the "dirty page" mitigation suggested by the person who reported the exploit.
You're not faking sudo with a mocking-bird on my machine. You're not using "su" from a regular user account. No userns either (no "insmod", no nothing).
Note that it's still possible to have several non-root users logged in as once: but from one user account, you cannot log in as another. You can however switch to TTY2, TTY3, etc. and log in as another user. And the whole XKCD about "get local account, get everything of importance", ain't valid either in my case.
I'm not saying it's perfect but it's not as simple as "get a local shell, wait until user enters 'sudo', get root". No sudo, no su.
It's brutally simple.
And, the best of all, it's a fully usable desktop: I'm using such a setup since years (I've also got servers, including at home, with Proxmox and VMs etc., but that's another topic).
Do you install system-wide software at all? How do you configure it?
That's my main reason to use "sudo" on the desktop.
I suppose I could install every piece of software locally, either from source or via flatpak, but this is a lot of work and much harder than doing it the easy way and using global install via my distro. Plus, non-distro installs are much more likely to be out of date and contain vulnerabilities of their own.
nixos comes to mind, rootless runpod, qubesos.
but they all have something in common, the issue is that your user is compromised that means the applications running in that user are compromised the only thing you gain is that you can trust your system, you can trust that your system is not compromised which is only relevant with infrastructure since if your user is compromised you're already fucked, multi-user setups with untrusted accounts are inheritly insecure and in infrastrucure the blast radius might be thousands of users that use the said service.
the breakdown looks something like this:
Would you mind sharing the relevant config?
Yes, you are very special and smart. Good for you!
Most people however aren't and will happily run sudo after an npm postinstall script tells them to apt-install turboencabulator for their new frontend framework to function.
You really can't protect against a malicious sysadmin. Let them be bitten, maybe they will be smarter next time.
When you control the bashrc of some other person, it is already kind of game over.
right, a bigger issue is multitenant systems, which are common in academia (I manage several such systems for various experiments). Now, we generally trust the users to not be malicious, but most don't get sudo, because physicists tend to think they know what they're doing when they don't really (except for me, of course).
Something that concerns me more is I use things like gemini-cli or claude-cli via their own, non-sudo accounts with no ssh keys or anything on my laptop, but a LPE means they can find away around such restrictions if they feel like it (and they might).
Perhaps, but it makes a huge difference if you're running the vulnerable code in a container or as a different user.
It seems like this round of vulns is going to be significant. What is the right response?
Personally I'm choosing to keep my home server behind a VPN and to enable Lockdown Mode on my phone and laptop for a while until the dust settles. As well as just limiting the software installed to trusted projects only.
VM isolation would still be safe even with these kernel exploits.
> Copy Fail 2: Electric Boogaloo
What are people thinking with these meme style vulnerability names? It's going to be hard to pitch "we need to push back the timeline on this new infrastructure deploy while we mitigate Copy Fail 2: Electric Boogaloo".
"we need to push back the timeline on this new infrastructure deploy while we mitigate Copy Fail 2". Problem solved
Maybe the new software should not have any errors. I know, I have higher expectations than the average commercial software customer.
Of course, why didn't anyone think of that ? I bet if someone started to ship software that has no errors they'll make a huge amount of money, especially from all the people that are security-minded !
Please grow a brain.
There is currently only method to prove absence of errors, this method is not LLMs, it's formal verification methods. Currently only very little formal verification is used in software industry, static type checking.
I've been doing alot of that lately
Alternatively, consider using Qubes OS, which isolates untrusted software using strong hardware virtualization. My daily driver, can't recommend it enough. Examples of usage patterns: https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/r4.3/user/how-to-guides/how-to-o...
I still can’t believe people are ok with software updates every day. Looking at you Claude code
It's a two-edged sword. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't update.
Fun fact: You still can't build the vllm container with updated dependencies since llmlite got pwned. Either due to regression bugs, or due to impossible transient dependencies in the dependency tree that are not resolvable. There is just too much slopcode down the line, and too many dependencies relying on pinned outdated (and unpublished) dependencies.
I switched to llama.cpp because of that.
To me it feels more and more that the slopcode world is the opposite philosophy of reproducible builds. It's like the anti methodology of how to work in that regard.
Before, everyone was publishing breaking changes in subminor packages because nobody adhered to any API versioning system standards. Now it's every commit that can break things. That is not an improvement.
Write only code is such a bad bad idea. No one is reviewing 20k loc PRS with 15 new dependencies in an afternoon. Sorry it's just not happening I don't care how many years you have been a software engineer. Yet that's the new thing and how we all are supposed to work or else we are all Luddites.
I'm personally waiting to be downgraded to simply being called "lazy".
When I see pages of obviously generated prose being submitted as any kind of documentation, my eyes just glaze over. I feel so guilty sharing similar stuff too, though to my credit, at least I always lead with a self-written TLDR, the slop is just for reference. But it's so bad, like genuinely distressing tier. I don't want to read all that junk, and more and more gets produced.
Prose type docs have always been my Achilles heel, and this is like the worst possible evolution of that.
For a brief period in the past few weeks, they somehow managed to make a change to ChatGPT Thinking that made it succint. The tone was super fact oriented too. It was honestly like waking up from a fever dream.
slopcode is a pejorative that means nothing to me. if you have an actual criticism to make, then do it
I do a bit wonder what happens as standard practice becomes to lag more and more and more. Who is there left that's looking, that'd finding out?
I think there’s already a big market of supply chain security companies that are proactively scanning dependencies for this sort of thing.
They’re always racing to be the first one to write an article about a case.
you raise a really good point. if everyone is doing this at exactly the same lag then it will eventually start hitting groups in sync at the exact same time
100% doing this, sadly
I dislike FUD like this :/
Dammit, this is why nobody uses NixOS. Nothing works on it!
The copyFail didn't, the dirtyfrag doesn't.
This copfail2 does modify /etc/passwd, but I can't `su - sick` as expected.
/s
sligtly unrelated, but the portable way to execute stuff is via `/usr/bin/env`, not `/bin/bash`.
I did try fixing the path to use nixos paths, but it was still unsuccessful. Did not really check further.
Fedora upgrades have usually been great, but I jumped the gun on Fedora 44. Sound completely dead with no Pipewire service available. ALSA not responding. Firefox dies immediately if I open a new tab or right click anywhere on the browser itself (inlcuding nightly builds). QEMU refuses to load. Maybe something got completely f'd in the upgrade process.. I never had an issue before having upgraded from Fedora 38 all the way to 43. I am too tired to investigate it all.
I know this is unrelated to the article, but related to the title.
I have had none of those issues on Fedora 44, FWIW.
ditto. my upgrade from 43 - 44 went very smooth
If this is still the same install that you've been using since 38, you might find a clean install resolves some issues (whether or not your upgrade got botched). Also helps me get rid of software I installed that I don't use anymore, which I feel is relevant to this article. But part of why I love Silverblue so much is I don't have to worry about upgrades getting botched and fwiw as well, I haven't noticed any of those bugs on 44 across several very different machines.
I had a day 1 crashloop with KWin on the 2nd desktop, but on day 2 some package update fixed it. Honestly it isn't the first time Fedora upgrades have messed something up for me either but I do think it's more stable than the average Ubuntu release, not that I've upgraded ubuntu in like 5 yrs.
Fedora 44 here, no issues.
Don't install anything, use an LLM to write everything from scratch. It may have bugs, but no one will know how to exploit them, especially when closed source.
Code is cheap and is becoming cheaper by the day. We need new paradigms.
So no external libraries for anything? Billions of lines of code that duplicate the same thing n-times across an organization?
And the benefit is the obscurity of "no one will know how to exploit them"?
No, thanks.
LLMs have been used to scan binary blobs for exploits already. What would be more effective is a system designed with multiple layers of security so any one exploit is largely useless.
Next: the back doors are written by the LLM!