The solution obviously is to go out-of-band:

> When a user visits a website that has enrolled in WEBCAT, before the site can load the content is checked against a signed manifest to ensure that it has not been tampered with (more on enrollment later). If everything checks out, the page loads normally. If, however, any content does not match what’s expected, the page load is aborted and a warning is displayed, protecting the user from potentially malicious content before it can execute.

[0]: https://securedrop.org/news/introducing-webcat-web-based-cod...

[1]: https://securedrop.org/news/browser-based-cryptography/

Most of these low-hanging bugs would have been caught upstream by now.

The about page claims 1000+ lbs of laundry folded every week.

But it is an important tool that's missing in our toolbox. You could do most of the above, and still get pwned by a typo in an `npx` command. Capability based access management is not likely to land in any large package manager in the next few years, and we need solutions that work today.

I wrote this in response to the recent AUR attacks. The problem isn’t really too many dependencies - it is that most users cannot be auditing everything they install and we need mechanisms that help users where they are.

I audit my AUR pkg builds, and I would have likely caught any malware. But so would a Dependency Cooldown or a third-party threat feed. Package Managers should make it easy to build this tooling via hooks.

Do you have examples of campaigns that weren’t flagged? Everything except xz had a 1 day window and Dependency Cooldowns are super effective against most campaigns for that reason.

See papers at https://kokkonisd.github.io/ for eg.

homebrew doesn't support hooks as a system package manager: https://github.com/ecosyste-ms/package-manager-hooks as an example.

I think the packaging ecosystem is varied enough that this should be left for the package managers to decide. Yarn allows dependency resolution and WebFetch overrides in its hooks for eg.

Dependency Cooldowns can be implemented with global hooks, git-commit-signing checks can be implemented, LLM-scans can be implemented, someone can run the code in a jail and use the eBPF logs to publish a threat feed.

Modern language packaging is also _source available_, and we have a huge leg up over traditional virus scans - we have the source code almost always. You can do amazing static analysis.

Yes, it’s hard work. But package managers are doing it already. Yay and Paru both now support hooks. I’m offering to help for AUR to publish more metadata: https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/aur-dev@lists.arch...

Modern package managers are not amenable to letting another script override its resolutions, and that is what needs fixing.

I’d left a comment last time, but haven’t tracked it since: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728216