Staged publishing and new install-time controls for npm

2 days ago (github.blog)

Seen favorably, staged publishing is a band aid. Seen more realistically I believe that in the long run it will even hurt our efforts for more secure infra.

  • How could it possibly hurt?

    For trusted publishing, it's not a band-aid, it's a significant improvement that kills an entire class of CI takeover publish attacks. I'm sure attackers will find another way but it's a big gap this is closing up.

meanwhile pnpm 10.x by default won't donwload packages younger than a day

  • Is one day enough to find vulnerabilities? Who keeps an eye on new releases? Otherwise the problem continues to exist, just delayed by one day.

    • There’s almost a dozen cybersecurity companies scanning NPM publishes in real-time and analysing them.

Perfect, now we'll start seeing people automate auto publishing because they don't want to explicitly push a button to publish it.