Comment by paustint
24 days ago
In this case, the author's NPM account was taken over, email address changed to one the attacker controls, and the package was manually published.
Since the attacker had full control of the NPM account, it is game over - the attacker can login to NPM and could, if they wanted, configure Trusted Publishing on any repo they control.
Axios IS using trusted publishing, but that didn't do anything to prevent the attack since the entire NPM account was taken over and config can be modified to allow publishing using a token.
Yeah, NPM should be enforcing 2FA and likely phishing resistant 2FA for some packages/ this should be a real control, issuing public audit events for email address changes, and publish events should include information how it was published (trusted publishing, manual publish, etc).
https://docs.npmjs.com/configuring-two-factor-authentication
> Important: Publishing to npm requires either: Two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled on your account, OR A granular access token with bypass 2FA enabled
I'm assuming the author must have been grandfathered in to TOTP?
Instead they took away TOTP as a factor.
Scaling security with the popularity of a repo does seem like a good idea.
Are there downsides to doing this? This was my first thought - though I also recognize that first thoughts are often naive.
2 replies →
TOTP isn't phishing resistant
8 replies →
TOTP seems effectively useless for npm so that seems fine to me
One wonders if Microsoft/npm.js should allow new packages to be published immediately following an account email address change? I mean changes to email address are already recognized as potential attack vectors, so emails are sent to the old address warning of potential account take over. But this seems to have been done at night, so the warning email would not be seen yet. Even so a new package could be published and served to the world immediately. Unless I misunderstand something about the facts this would indicate an extreme lack of imagination in the people at Microsoft who already went through several cycles of hardening the service against supply chain poisoning attacks.
Well, that sucks! It’ll be interesting to learn how they obtained a valid second factor or 2FA bypass; that will inform the next round of defenses here.