Comment by zahlman
21 hours ago
That argument is FUD. The people who created the NPM package manager are not the people who wrote your dependencies. Further, supply chain attacks occur for reasons that are entirely outside NPM's control. Fundamentally they're a matter of trust in the ecosystem — in the very idea of installing the packages in the first place.
Lack of stronger trust controls are part of the larger issue with npm. Pip, Maven and Go are not immune either but they do things structurally better to shift the problem.
Go: Enforces global, append-only integrity via a checksum database and version immutability; once a module version exists, its contents cannot be silently altered without detection, shifting attacks away from artifact substitution toward “publish a malicious new version” or bypass the proxy/sumdb.
Maven: Requires structured namespace ownership and signed artifacts, making identity more explicit at publish time; this raises the bar for casual impersonation but still fundamentally trusts that the key holder and build pipeline were not compromised.