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Comment by gslepak

3 months ago

Tips to protect yourself from supply-chain attacks in the JavaScript ecosystem:

- Don't update dependencies unless necessary

- Don't use `npm` to install NPM packages, use Deno with appropriate sandboxing flags

- Sign up for https://socket.dev and/or https://www.aikido.dev

- Work inside a VM

16 comments

gslepak

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egorfine  3 months ago

> Don't update dependencies unless necessary

And get yourself drowning in insurmountable technical debt in about two months.

JS ecosystems moves at an extremely fast pace and if you don't upgrade packages (semi) daily you might inflict a lot of pain on you once a certain count of packages start to contain incompatible version dependencies. It sucks a lot, I know.

  • lpribis  3 months ago

    Updating packages daily (!) is insane to me as someone from the other end of the programming spectrum (embedded C). Is this really the recommended practice?

    • egorfine  3 months ago

      It is insane to me as a C programmer as well. It is something I got used to as a frontend js developer.

      It so recommend to stay on top of the dependencies and for different stacks this means different update schedule. For some, daily is indeed a good choice.

      2 replies →

    • DecoySalamander  3 months ago

      It really isn't, and I've never seen anyone do that. In every project I've worked on in the past decade, dependencies were only occasionally bumped in the context of some maintenance task or migration.

    • acdha  3 months ago

      It varies but there are a lot of tools built around the idea of rapid updates so things like APIs can change quickly throughout a far more fragmented ecosystem. I suspect that we’re going to see a lot of places back off of that a bit to have something like monthly update cycles where there’s more time for scanning and review while still expecting people to upgrade more frequently than used to be common.

  • gslepak  3 months ago

    > daily

    Somehow we've survived without updating dependencies for probably at least a year.

    • egorfine  3 months ago

      Then you probably have over a dozen CVEs in your code. Now, this is a different question whether they are exploitable and how much it is a risk.

      Other than that you now probably have an insurmountable technical debt and upgrading the dependencies is a project of itself.

      All the above applies to JavaScript world, of course. It's much different for the rest.

      3 replies →