Containing Malicious Package Updates in npm with a Lightweight Permission System

The large amount of third-party packages available in fast-moving software ecosystems, such as Node.js/npm, enables attackers to compromise applications by pushing malicious updates to their package dependencies. Studying the npm repository, we observed that many packages in the npm repository that...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings / International Conference on Software Engineering pp. 1334 - 1346
Main Authors: Ferreira, Gabriel, Jia, Limin, Sunshine, Joshua, Kastner, Christian
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 01.05.2021
Subjects:
design trade-offs
Ecosystems
malicious package updates
package management
permission system
Runtime
sandboxing
Security
Software
supplychain security
ISBN:1665402962, 9781665402965
ISSN:1558-1225
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The large amount of third-party packages available in fast-moving software ecosystems, such as Node.js/npm, enables attackers to compromise applications by pushing malicious updates to their package dependencies. Studying the npm repository, we observed that many packages in the npm repository that are used in Node.js applications perform only simple computations and do not need access to filesystem or network APIs. This offers the opportunity to enforce least-privilege design per package, protecting applications and package dependencies from malicious updates. We propose a lightweight permission system that protects Node.js applications by enforcing package permissions at runtime. We discuss the design space of solutions and show that our system makes a large number of packages much harder to be exploited, almost for free.
ISBN:1665402962
9781665402965
ISSN:1558-1225
DOI:10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00121