[pdonis]

> It's a little hard to point the finger at application developers here, IMO.

I disagree. Any application developer who seriously thinks that they only have 10 dependencies if they're only importing directly 10 dependencies should not be an application developer in the first place.

[IggleSniggle]

You sure about that? Even if you’re writing just for a vetted distribution of an OS, and you write code with zero explicit dependencies, you still have much more than zero dependencies. It’s turtles all the way down. The key is to have an entire ecosystem that you can, to some degree more or less, trust.

[marcus_holmes]

No. we've been shouting warnings for years. There have been dozens, if not hundreds of threads on HN alone warning of supply-chain security threats.

At this point if you're not actively auditing your dependencies, and reducing all of them where you can, then you're on the wrong side of history and going down with the Titanic.

The frank truth is that including a dependency is, and always has been, giving a random person from the internet commit privileges to prod. The fact that "everyone else did it" doesn't make it less stupid.

[erulabs]

> The frank truth is that including a dependency is, and always has been, giving a random person from the internet commit privileges to prod

I mean, no. This is hyperbole at best and just wrong at median. A system of relative trust has worked very well for a very long time - Linus doesn’t have root access to all our systems, even if we don’t have to read every line of code.

[chha]

Linus doesn't have root access to our systems for several reasons. One of them is the fact that we get the actual source code, and not just a compiled blob doing "something". Another is the fact that they have at least some level of reviews wrt who can commit code, although this isn't perfect as the case with the University of Minnesota proved.

Npm on the other hand is much, much worse. Anyone can publish anything they want, and they can point to any random source code repository claiming that this is the source. If we look at how often vulnerable packages are discovered in eg. npm, I'd argue that the current level of trust and quality aren't sustainable, partly due to the potentially huge number of direct and transitive dependencies a project may have.

Unless you start to review the actual component you have no way to verify this, and unlike the Linux kernel there is no promise that anyone has ever reviewed the package you download. You can of course add free tools such as the OWASP Dependency Check, but these will typically lag a bit behind as they rely on published vulnerabilities. Other tools such as the Sonatype Nexus platform is more proactive, but can be expensive.

[elevader]

Maybe this is arguing semantics but unless you run something like Gentoo you will most likely get the linux kernel as a binary blob contained in a package your distribution provides. There isn't really any guarantee that this will actually contain untampered linux kernel sources (and in case of something like RHEL it most likely doesn't because of backports) unless you audit it, which most people won't do (and maybe can't do). So, in princpile at least, this isn't really that much better than the node_modules situation. Security and trust are hard issues and piling on 100s of random js dependencies sure doesn't help but you either build everything yourself or you need to trust somebody at some point.

[chha]

It depends on how you look at it. If I'm running Debian, I have decided to trust their sources and their process, regardless of how their software is being delivered. That process and the implementation of it is the basis for my trust. If I'm really paranoid, I can even attempt to reproduce the builds to verify that nothing has changed between the source and the binary blob.[1]

For npm, trust isn't really a concept. The repository is just a channel used to publish packages, they don't accept any responsibility for anything published, which is fair considering they allow anyone to publish for free. There are no mechanisms in npm that can help you verify the origin of a package and point to a publicly available source code repository or that ensures that the account owner was actually the person who published the package.

Security and trust is very hard, but my point here is that npm does nothing to facilitate either, making it very difficult for the average developer to be aware of any issues. The one tool you get with npm is...not really working the way it was supposed to.[2]

1 - https://reproducible-builds.org/ 2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27761334

[ptx]

You do need to trust somebody (such as your Linux distribution of choice) but with NPM you're trusting thousands of somebodies and your system's security depends directly on all of them being secure and trustworthy.

[marcus_holmes]

Linux has all sorts of controls and review policies that NPM doesn't have. It's a false equivalence to say "we trust Linux, so therefore trusting NPM is OK".

If <random maintainer> commits code to their repo, pushes it to npm, and you pull that in to your project (possibly as an indirect dependency), what controls are in place to ensure that that code is not malicious? As far as I can tell, there are none. So how is this not trusting that <random maintainer> with commit-to-prod privileges?

[IggleSniggle]

Yeah, this is what I meant, except it goes in all directions. It’s not stating a “false equivalence” because pointing out that you can draw a line between 0 and 100 isn’t stating an equivalence.

Different risk profiles exist. There’s a difference between installing whatever from wherever, installing a relatively well known project but with only one or two Actually Trusted maintainers, and installing a high profile well maintained project with corporate backing.

This is true in Linux land, and it’s true in npm land. You can’t just add whatever repo and apt get to your hearts content. Or, you know, you also can, depending on your tolerance for risk.

[marcus_holmes]

I agree with what you're saying, but I don't see any discussion of risk in any conversation about JS programming (and I'm only picking on JS because of the OP - Ruby and Python aren't any better, and even Rust is heading the same way).

For example (taking one of the top results for "javascript dependency management" at random): https://webdesign.tutsplus.com/tutorials/a-guide-to-dependen... talks about all the dependency management methods available. The word "risk" is not in that article. There is no paragraph saying "be aware that none of these package managers audit any of the packages they serve, and you are at risk of supply-chain attack if you import a dependency using any of them".

This doesn't get any better as you get more expert. I've had conversations with JS devs who've been professionally coding for years, and none of them are aware of it (or if they are, treat it as a serious threat). You can see the same in the comments here.

If there's not even any discussion of risk, and no efforts to manage it, then it's not really a relevant factor. No-one is considering the risk of importing dependencies, so the 0-100 scale is permanently stuck on 100.

[waingake]

And should we all start rolling our own crypto now to avoid dependencies? In most cases a stable library is going to be much more secure than a custom implementation of `x`. Everything has trade-offs. What's stupid is dogma.

[djbusby]

I know you're being hyperbolic and I also want to add that for crypto you should just use libsodium. The algos and the code are very good. And lots of very smart folk have given it a lot of review. And its API is very nice.

[IggleSniggle]

When you say this, do you mean actual C libsodium? Because surely you don’t mean that I, a js developer, should need to figure out how to wrap this .h file thingy to get it to work in js when there’s SIX third-party libsodium implementations/wrappers/projects sitting right there listed on the libsodium website? /s

[jimmont]

This. And npm isn't the only instance. (Appreciate the voice in the wilderness Marcus.)

[FranksTV]

Or perhaps, the sky is not falling.

[pdonis]

> Even if you’re writing just for a vetted distribution of an OS, and you write code with zero explicit dependencies, you still have much more than zero dependencies.

Sure, the entire OS is a dependency. Nothing I said contradicts that. And yes, every application developer should be aware of what they are depending on when they write software for a particular OS.

> The key is to have an entire ecosystem that you can, to some degree more or less, trust.

You don't necessarily need to trust an entire ecosystem, but yes, every dependency you have is a matter of trust on your part; you are trusting the dependency to work the way you need it to work and not to introduce vulnerabilities that you aren't aware of and can't deal with. Which is why you need to be explicitly aware of every dependency you have, not just the ones you directly import.

[IggleSniggle]

I am actually not sure if this is possible, while also accepting security updates etc from my OS distributor? How do you literally personally vet every line of code that gets run directly AND indirectly by your application, and still have time to write an application?

I’m okay with saying, “I trust RHEL to be roughly ok, just understand the model and how to use it, and keep my ear to the ground for the experts in case something comes up.”

At the level of npm, I feel roughly the same about React. I don’t trust it quite as much, but I’m also not going to read every code change. I’ll read a CHANGELOG, sure, and spelunk through the code from time to time, but that’s not really the same. I’ll probably check out their direct dependencies the first time, but that’s it.

I actually don’t know how you could call yourself an application developer in most ecosystems and know every single dependency you actually have all the way down, soup to nuts. Heck, there are dependencies that I accept so that my code will run on machines that I have no special knowledge of, not just my own familiar architecture. I accept them because I want to work on the details of my application and have it be useful on more than just my own machine.

Edit for clarity: I agree with almost everything you’re suggesting as sensible. Just not with your conclusion: that you’re not a “real” application developer if you don’t know all of your dependencies

[pdonis]

> I am actually not sure if this is possible, while also accepting security updates etc from my OS distributor?

Accepting the OS as a dependency includes the security updates from the OS, sure.

> How do you literally personally vet every line of code

Ah, I see, you think "understanding the dependency" requires vetting every line of code. That's not what I meant. What I meant is, if you use library A, and library A depends on libraries B, C, and D, and those libraries in turn depend on libraries E, F, G, H, I, etc. etc., then you don't just need to be aware that you depend on library A, because that's the only one you're directly importing. You need to be aware of all the dependencies, all the way down. You might not personally vet every line of code in every one of them, but you need to be aware that you're using them and you need to be aware of how trustworthy they are, so you can judge whether it's really worth having them and exposing your application to the risks of using them.

> I’ll probably check out their direct dependencies the first time, but that’s it.

So if they introduce a new dependency, you don't care? You should. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Again, you might not go and vet every line of code in the new dependency, but you need to be aware that it's there and how risky it is.

> I actually don’t know how you could call yourself an application developer in most ecosystems and know every single dependency you actually have all the way down, soup to nuts.

If you're developing using open source code, information about what dependencies a given library has is easily discoverable. If you're developing for a proprietary system, things might be different.

[IggleSniggle]

I really appreciate your stance, but just have to disagree. If it’s core React, I don’t check beyond what curiosity mandates. If it’s a smaller project with less eyes on it, yes absolutely I’ll work through the dependency chain. But that can also get pretty context dependent, based on where the code is deployed.

But I don’t know how you can make such a strong distinction between “a committed line of code” vs “a dependency”, because the only thing differentiating them is the relative strength of earned trust regarding commits to “stdlib,” commits to “core,” commits to “community adopted,” etc.

It’s too much. There’s a long road of grey between “manually checks every line running on all possible systems where code runs and verifies code against compiled binary” and “just run npm install and yer done!”