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dec0dedab0detoday at 3:30 PM2 repliesview on HN

Batteries included systems are still susceptible to supply chain attacks, they just move slower so it’s not as attractive of a target.

I think packages of a certain size need to be held to higher standards by the repositories. Multiple users should have to approve changes. Maybe enforced scans (though with trivy’s recent compromise that wont be likely any time soon)

Basically anything besides lone developer can decide to send something out on a whim that will run on millions of machines.


Replies

Drakimtoday at 5:21 PM

While technically true, it's so much slower that it's essentially a different thing. Third party packages being attacked is a near daily occurrence. First party attacks happens on the timescale and frequency of decades.

It's like the difference in protecting your home from burglars and foreign nation soldiers. Both are technically invaders to your home, but the scope is different, and the solutions are different.

xienzetoday at 9:38 PM

> they just move slower so it’s not as attractive of a target.

Well, there’s other things. Maven doesn’t allow you to declare “version >= x.y.z” and doesn’t run arbitrary scripts upon pulling dependencies, for one thing. The Java classpath doesn’t make it possible to have multiple versions of the same library at the same time. That helps a lot too.

NPM and the way node does dependency management just isn’t great. Never has been.