Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by koblas 1796 days ago
The "biggest" problem in the JavaScript ecosystem (NPM) is that dependadabot doesn't know how to discriminate between dependancies and devDepandancies.

I don't really care if jest includes a package that has a regex issue. It's not production code. I do care if babel introduces a backdoor, but somehow they're treated with equal importance.

2 comments

PM for security products at GitHub here.

Totally agree. The good news is that I think GitHub is in a position to fix this - expect progress in the next 12 months.

One change that's needed here is data for each vulnerability on whether it's ever relevant in development. The advisory database that powers GitHub's security alerts (and npm audit, and NuGet audit) now has a dedicated curation team and is ready to curate more ecosystems and more information.

That data then needs to be hooked up with GitHub's security alerting logic. That shouldn't be too difficult - we already detect whether a dependency is used in development or production, and the team here is growing.

Finally, for this to work we'd need a new UI concept for vulnerabilities you aren't affected by. We're already working on functionality with a very similar requirement (one that tells you whether you're using the vulnerable function within a dependency).

I can't make promises, but I can say that GitHub has an increasing amount of energy. Expect progress :-)

It depends, attacks via build pipelines can be devastating.
Yep.

Unfortunately it’s not clear cut that we don’t have to worry about devDependencies vulnerabilities.