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by underscoring 839 days ago
> or it is "I can trust this code".

what might be better would be some kind of trust layer built into package managers so they (optionally) only allow verified repos to be installed

2 comments

There are countless of solutions that try to do this, both official and non official, both at package and repository level, npm from NodeJS comes with a security audit tool for example, and most code hosting solutions nowadays have at least a SAST tool built in, but expecting more from free services it's a bit of pipe dream.

Obviously it's hard to make a one-size-fits-all solutions, bottom line is that if you use third party code for anything serious you have to do your due diligence from a security pov, a vulnerability assessment at the bare minimum.

Lots of big companies are in fact maintaining their own versions of whole package ecosystems just to manually address any security concern, which is a crazy effort.

Doing that well would cost money, and people are used to getting their package managers for free.