[omouse]

If this happens often, perhaps the user interface for npm publish needs to change? I mean, that's the only thing I can see mitigating this, with like a nice dialog that says "hey, are you REALLY REALLY sure and have you consulted lawyers on this???"

Or something to that effect. Or maybe companies can just pony up for NPM Enterprise which fits their use case.

[austincheney]

I work at a major bank and for the US Army. Both of those organizations are hyper sensitive about security for good reasons. Unfortunately that hyper sensitivity often results in really bad decisions and gross misunderstanding of software.

Publishing software is not a security violation in greater than 98% of cases. The only valid exceptions are protections of trade secrets and cryptographic information.

I am not counting software with embedded credentials, embedded business data, or other bad practices. Those are security violations regardless of public exposure.

Trying to explain this to security sensitive organizations is painful. I am confident in the stupidity of this conversation as somebody who has been writing code for more than 20 years and passed the CISSP exam the first time back when it was a 250 question paper test.

[xemdetia]

I'm trying to understand your point. I agree with the basic premise that most pieces of code that end up not getting exposed are not sensitive, but building guardrails to ensure people who aren't security minded ask the right questions and get closer to 'default correct' ends up being a requirement in major banks/government organizations. The number of times someone has done something completely silly like include API keys in a public package or Git repo is reason enough to care. Being beholden on an external system being secure and up to standard ruins pretty much every category of a risk analysis, especially when you end up with gold like this article or the PHP PEAR hack.

Then there is always that part of the organization that isn't judicious about keeping packages up to date, and these kinds of package exposures expose their negligence.

Then there is the other piece of my systems being dependent on your systems in a sometimes inappropriate matter if precautions aren't taken. 'Oh I just added this dependency' is a quick way to an outage if rules aren't set.

[austincheney]

> The number of times someone has done something completely silly like include API keys in a public package or Git repo is reason enough to care.

Agreed, but that is not a publication problem. That is a separation of concerns violation which indicates a host of other problems from the lack of code review to incomplete security testing to various ad hoc or integrity violations.

External systems have no bearing on the validity and completeness of your organizations internal security controls. It doesn't matter how incomplete, insecure, or unqualified NPM is to serve a given set of code. The problem isn't NPM or the publication to NPM. The problem is the contents that comprise the publication in question. A good security audit would ask why any certain content is available for publication in violation of internal policy regardless of what that content is.

For example if you accidentally publish to NPM code containing a bunch of user PII the problem is why PII was resident in the code in the first prior to publication. The fact that such PII is exposed is now a different second problem demanding a different resolution. You could make the argument that halting and regulating all publications would solve that problem. That is incorrect, because the PII is still exposed within your organization outside of a controlled environment and can still be leaked to the public by various other means.

> Then there is always that part of the organization that isn't judicious about keeping packages up to date, and these kinds of package exposures expose their negligence.

That is dependency management whether or not you own the packages in question. Dependencies need to be appropriately managed for a variety of security reasons. Exposing poor dependency management advertises a vulnerability, but the vulnerability is there anyways and a dedicated malicious attacker will exploit it the same either way.

---

The bottom line is that hiding your security problems by "not publishing" is not a valid security control. That is the dreaded security by obfuscation and it works both ways. By hiding the vulnerability you also hide the exploitation from visibility.

[knicholes]

You could not have a default. Then in order for someone to publish to the public NPM, they'd have to enter the URL for the public NPM. Otherwise publish should fail.

[vvoyer]

No alert box ever will save you from doing the biggest mistakes, most people don’t read them.

[ivan_gammel]

Just compare this to publication to Maven Central - you’ll never publish there by accident exactly because there are significant barriers. Public NPM repo should not be that easily accessible for upload.

[kbenson]

At some points in a language and its package management system's lifetime, reducing barriers to publishing are one of the best things that can be done to increase packages and fill out the ecosystem, and drive utility and adoption.

Later, once you have most needs filled by packages, and a good number of enterprise users, more control is beneficial. Companies appreciate it, and single users are willing to jump through an extra hoop or two much of the time because the rest of the ecosystem is so useful that it's not worth switching languages.

I think it's unlikely that a system will move from one style to another without an event causing them to reevaluate their prior choices. More likely, multiple events. This has already happened with NPM for other choices they made in the past, such as letting package namespaces be claimed by new people after someone gives it up, and whether releases are immutable, IIRC.

[lugg]

Please don't think this way.

This is such a solvable problem.

Doesn't package.json have an is private repo flag? Why not just respect that?

Why does everyone everyone in this thread think a pop up is the solution?

Pop ups are a code smell. They mean your application does not correctly match user intent with the action so badly you had to specifically get your user to tell you what they meant to do. Did you mean to do that? Always, yes. Otherwise, undo.

The only place did you mean makes sense is in Google search results.

Why is public and private publish anywhere near each other? Why are they even on the same page?

Stop drawing boundaries around nouns.

[madeofpalk]

> Doesn't package.json have an is private repo flag? Why not just respect that?

npm does reflect that flag. If you set private in package.json, npm won't publish it publicly. From docs:

> private

> If you set "private": true in your package.json, then npm will refuse to publish it.

> This is a way to prevent accidental publication of private repositories. If you would like to ensure that a given package is only ever published to a specific registry (for example, an internal registry), then use the publishConfig dictionary described below to override the registry config param at publish-time.

[bigiain]

Perhaps inverting the logic there might be worth considering?

Make it so you have to explicitly go in and mark your package.json as public before npm will publish it, and have the default be private?

I don't have _too_ much sympathy for the bank here - it's in npm's best interest to make it easy to publish leftpad.js easily <snarky smirk> - and that probably should be their default stance.

The bank should be responsible for ensuring their "banking grade security" includes not accidentally publishing their source code to public repos. (How much would you bet against there being instances exactly like this where the publication vector was GitHub instead of npm? How much would you bet against this exact code being on a public git repo somewhere as well? How many public code hosting services should be expected to change their business models because some bank gets uptight after they've fucked up?)

[Nimelrian]

The npm docs also state that the "files" property of the package.json limits what gets installed if you install that package in another project.

Ever tried installing a local package via a file path? NPM just symlinks it into node_modules, causing issues because you suddenly have duplicated dependencies. Yarn does the same, btw.

I have given up any hope regarding npm/yarn acting sensible long ago.

[sascha_sl]

>publishConfig

https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/5310

oops

[eklavya]

> Pop ups are a code smell. They mean your application does not correctly match user intent with the action so badly you had to specifically get your user to tell you what they meant to do.

Not a rule. Do you really want undoable actions like "Delete" to just delete in a touch operated interface?

[alexanderdmitri]

I disagree, there have been times a well-placed popup stopped me from accidentally doing something really stupid, other times there wasn't a popup and I ended up doing something stupid.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a pop up popup per say, but extra validation around dangerous actions is user friendly.

And of course there can always be an override for the extra validation in case it potentially screws up some people's workflows, but I'd make a user explicitly set the override, like the 'NoHostAuthenticationForLocalhost' option in ssh for example.

[gowld]

Popups only work if they Confirm button is not a button, but "enter this text exactly: I really want to publish this package to the whole wide world" and block copy-paste.

If the user hacks around that, it's their own fault.

[lugg]

If a pop up is required to prevent you doing something stupid the UX has already failed.

I don't think a popup solving a problem means it is solving the right problem in the right way.

[kbenson]

I wasn't condoning popups. I was making a high level observation of package systems in general.

That said, I fully support a terminal level confirmation the first time something is pushed publicly in any package manager. It is absolutely the correct thing to do to add safeties to a process that is irreversible and can have negative consequences. Often enough, making anything public online is irreversible, and making something public that wasn't ever supposed to be can have negative consequences in many respects.

But what I was really thinking of when I was typing my original comment was moving to a system where someone actually approves new package publishing accounts and or some subset of package namespace requests. Systems that start without any sort of moderating or approval process seem to eventually settle on one. The reasons for this are numerous, from security to just keeping people from overwhelming the more common or sought after names and general sanity checks (does a system really need to allow separate packages for a term where one is singular and one is plural? Who does that help?).

[kall]

npm publish already prevents you from publishing a package that has the private flag. They must not have had it set.

[ljm]

This is going to be cynical, but as far as I understand it people are looking for usability through vanity.

Why not install `com.facebook.react’? Reverse domain notation is remarkably elegant given our internet. You are not typing ‘npm i com.facebook.react’ so often that it’s a pain. You probably use ‘create-react-app’ which is even worse.

Instead, every language creates a new cash grab for common names. And made it worse. New namespaces, new squatting. I can publish ‘react-racket’ and do whatever I want behind the scenes with it.

Case in point: do you add coffeescript or coffee-script.

Why optimise for keystrokes in your term instead of stability for your client? Jesus fuck.

[gowld]

The JavaScript community is moving into the Enterprise and is discovering Java's good ideas from 1995

[bigiain]

Excellent.

A whole quarter of a century, or perhaps half of the entire software industries lifetime, of exciting known security errors to look forward to!

BRB, off to hide all my bitcoin under my mattress...

[jeswin]

> Why not install `com.facebook.react’?

That would be a bad idea, and it's not just brevity.

- If com.facebook.hr has previously been published, would it mean that facebook can never have a division named HR?

- Once a company goes belly up, the domain often ends up with squatters/spammers. Domains with published packages will sell for a lot more in the underground market - for pure exploitation of rights to publish a newer version.

- In the absence of validation, nothing stops anyone from publishing com.google.exploitlib. And domain validation is friction.

- Most publishers on npm may not have a domain.

And finally like someone mentioned below, npm already supports scoped packages. https://docs.npmjs.com/about-scopes

[oblio]

Regarding your concerns, some friction is necessary. Without friction I can skate, but I can't drive.

[kall]

There's a little bit of movement happening in that direction in the npm world with scoped packages. E.g. babel moving all official packages to @babel. Storybook does it too. Doesn't even have to be much of a branding loss. FB could publish @react/react, @react/native, @react/eslint-config, @react/create-app, @react/prop-types, @react/dom... Most of the typing is happening in require/import not npm install, so there's some argument for not going the full java route.

[satori99]

Setting `private: true` to your package.json will prevent this from happening

[duncan-donuts]

setting `public:true` would solve this problem

[isostatic]

But default should be public - it's an open source piece of software

[OnlyOneCannolo]

What you're describing is consumer protection, but a company isn't a consumer. The bank responsible for their own actions.

[ljm]

No, the first step is to say you haven’t set a publish source. Your toolkit might generate that but you should also see that in code review.

[philliphaydon]

It should not auto create accounts. Compared to Nuget. I find NPM absolutely scary to use because it’s unpredictable. (Personal opinion)

[newsbinator]

It would be good if there were a standard format for referencing private keys in code, like "pk_*". Then NPM could say,

> "it looks like your package might have a private key in file xyz.js on line 27. Please type "no it doesn't" into the box below if you're sure this is not the case".