Comment by graemep
6 days ago
> Nobody should do 'npm install' or 'pip install' on their machine.
What alternative do you suggest?
Do you mean not install outside a sandbox?
6 days ago
> Nobody should do 'npm install' or 'pip install' on their machine.
What alternative do you suggest?
Do you mean not install outside a sandbox?
I've been playing around with declarative container configurations: https://github.com/AdrianVollmer/ContainerConductor (It's not ready, don't use it!)
It will always introduce friction, though.
Modern software development is simply too fast to be reviewed properly.
Download source. Extract. Move files to correct node_modules folder.
If your distribution requires more than this, then it's not really a module, or combines too many non-modular components, and should be distributed differently.
The ability for npm to run scripts on any level should be removed.
Then we can go back to worrying about namespacing issues.
If an attacker can infect the post-install script of an npm package, they can also infect the package source code itself. So if you ever run the project outside the sandbox, you will still get compromised.
It's like saying "I don't trust a software app with an installer, I just want a .zip with the binaries from the same source that I will run myself"
> they can also infect the package source code itself
Which is where the concept of "safe levels" come in. I should be able to install this module in such a way where file operations and process operations are not available to it. That being said, presumably, this types of infiltration would seem to be _much_ easier to spot. "Why is this web framework calling 'spawn'?"
> I just want a .zip with the binaries
I want a .zip with the _code_. Just the code. None of the packaging nonsense. My distribution can handle that.
2 replies →
> The ability for npm to run scripts on any level should be removed.
Even Python has that ability now. Also, `npm run dev` is running the script with full disk access.
Heck, Vscode/Cursor will auto-execute code if you open a project. And this has been actively used in the wild https://ashishb.net/security/contagious-interview/
You discovered what web development was like in early 2000.
alias npm / bun / ... to run in a docker container, so npm install run automatically in the container.
That's exactly what I started with. It gets unwieldy quickly enough as you need to mount a lot of directories that these you uses as cache.
So, amazing-sandbox at its core is nothing but a glorified docker command generator (in default mode).