NPM

8 Articles

This Week In Security: Npm Timing Leak, Siemens Universal Key, And PHP In PNG

October 14, 2022 by 12 Comments

First up is some clever wizardry from the [Aqua Nautilus] research team, who discovered a timing attack that leaks information about private npm packages. The setup is this, npm hosts both public and private node.js packages. The public ones are available to everyone, but the private packages are “scoped”, meaning they live within a private namespace, “@owner/packagename” and are inaccessible to the general public. Trying to access the package results in an HTTP 404 error — the same error as trying to pull a package that doesn’t exist.


The clever bit is to keep trying, and really pay attention to the responses. Use npm’s API to request info on your target package, five times in a row. If the package name isn’t in use, all five requests will take the expected amount of time. That request lands at the service’s backend, a lookup is performed, and you get the response. On the flipside if your target package does exist, but is privately scoped, the first request returns with the expected delay, and the other four requests return immediately. It appears that npm has front-end that can cache a 404 response for a private package. That response time discrepancy means you can map out the private package names used by a given organization in their private scope.

Now this is all very interesting, but it turns into a plausible attack when combined with typosquatting and dependency confusion issues. Those attacks are two approaches to the same goal, get a node.js deployment to run a malicious package instead of the legitimate one the developer intended. One depends on typos, but dependency confusion just relies on a developer not explicitly defining the scope of a package.

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This Week In Security: NPM Vandalism, Simulating Reboots, And More

January 14, 2022 by 33 Comments

We’ve covered quite a few stories about malware sneaking into NPM and other JavaScript repositories. This is a bit different. This time, a JS programmer vandalized his own packages. It’s not even malware, perhaps we should call it protestware? The two packages, colors and faker are both popular, with a combined weekly download of nearly 23 million. Their author, [Marak] added a breaking update to each of them. These libraries now print a header of LIBERTY LIBERTY LIBERTY, and then either random characters, or very poor ASCII art. It’s been confirmed that this wasn’t an outside attacker, but [Marak] breaking his own projects on purpose. Why?

It seems like this story starts back in late 2020, when [Marak] lost quite a bit in a fire, and had to ask for money on Twitter. Edit: Thanks to commenter [Jack Dansen] for pointing out an important detail that was missing. Marak was charged for reckless endangerment, and was suspected for possible terrorism aspirations, as bomb-making materials were found in his burned-out apartment. Two weeks later, he tweeted that billions were being made off open source devs’ work, citing a FAANG leak. FAANG is a reference to the big five American tech companies: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. The same day, he opened an issue on Github for faker.js, throwing down an ultimatum: “Take this as an opportunity to send me a six figure yearly contract or fork the project and have someone else work on it.”
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This Week In Security: Printing Shellz, Ms-officecmd, And AI Security

December 10, 2021 by 18 Comments

Researchers at f-secure have developed an impressive new attack, leveraging HP printers as an unexpected attack surface. Printing Shellz (PDF) is a one-click attack, where simply visiting a malicious webpage is enough to get a shell and reverse proxy installed to a printer on the same network. The demo below uses a cross-site printing (XSP) attack to send the malicious print job to the printer without any further interactions.
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ua-parser-js compromised

Supply Chain Attack: NPM Library Used By Facebook And Others Was Compromised

October 22, 2021 by 26 Comments

Here at Hackaday we love the good kinds of hacks, but now and then we need to bring up a less good kind. Today it was learned that the NPM package ua-parser-js was compromised, and any software using it as a library may have become victim of a supply chain attack. What is ua-parser-js and why does any of this matter?

In the early days of computing, programmers would write every bit of code they used themselves. Larger teams would work together to develop larger code bases, but it was all done in-house. These days software developers don’t write every piece of code. Instead they use libraries of code supplied by others.

For better or worse, repositories of code are now available to do even the smallest of functions so that a developer doesn’t have to write the function from scratch. One such registry is npm (Node Package Manager), who organize a collection of contributed libraries written in JavaScript. One only need to use npm to include a library in their code, and all of the functions of that code are available to the developer. One such example is ua-parser-js which is a User Agent Parser written in JavaScript. This library makes it easy for developers to find out the type of device and software being used to access a web page.

On October 22 2021, the developer of ua-parser-js found that attackers had uploaded a version of his software that contained malware for both Linux and Windows computers. The malicious versions were found to steal data (including passwords and Chrome cookies, perhaps much more) from computers or run a crypto-currency miner. This prompted GitHub to issue a Critical Severity Security Advisory.

What makes this compromise so dangerous is that ua-parser-js is considered to be part of a supply chain, and has been adopted even by Facebook for use in some of its customer facing software. The developer of ua-parser-js has already secured his GitHub account and uploaded new versions of the package that are clean. If you have any software that uses this library, make sure you’ve got the latest version!

Of course this is by no means a unique occurrence. Last month Maya Posch dug into growing issues that come from some flaws of trust in package management systems. The art for that article is a house of cards, an apt metaphor for a system that is only as stable as the security of each and every package being built upon.

The Dark Side Of Package Repositories: Ownership Drama And Malware

September 8, 2021 by 77 Comments

At their core, package repositories sound like a dream: with a simple command one gains access to countless pieces of software, libraries and more to make using an operating system or developing software a snap. Yet the rather obvious flip side to this is that someone has to maintain all of these packages, and those who make use of the repository have to put their faith in that whatever their package manager fetches from the repository is what they intended to obtain.

How ownership of a package in such a repository is managed depends on the specific software repository, with the especially well-known JavaScript repository NPM having suffered regular PR disasters on account of it playing things loose and fast with package ownership. Quite recently an auto-transfer of ownership feature of NPM was quietly taken out back and erased after Andrew Sampson had a run-in with it painfully backfiring.

In short, who can tell when a package is truly ‘abandoned’, guarantee that a package is free from malware, and how does one begin to provide insurance against a package being pulled and half the internet collapsing along with it?

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What Does GitHub’s Npm Acquisition Mean For Developers?

March 26, 2020 by 33 Comments

Microsoft’s open-source shopping spree has claimed another victim: npm. [Nat Friedman], CEO of GitHub (owned by Microsoft), announced the move recently on the GitHub blog.

So what motivated the acquisition, and what changes are we likely to see as a result of it? There are some obvious upsides and integrations, but these will be accompanied by the usual dose of skepticism from the open-source community. The company history and working culture of npm has also had its moments in the news, which may well have contributed to the current situation. This post aims to explore some of the rationale behind the acquisition, and what it’s likely to mean for developers in the future.

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This Week In Security: Unicode, Truecrypt, And NPM Vulnerabilities

December 20, 2019 by 22 Comments

Unicode, the wonderful extension to to ASCII that gives us gems like “✈”, “⌨”, and “☕”, has had some unexpected security ramifications. The most common problems with Unicode are visual security issues, like character confusion between letters. For example, the English “M” (U+004D) is indistinguishable from the Cyrillic “М” (U+041C). Can you tell the difference between IBM.com and IBМ.com?

This bug, discovered by [John Gracey] turns the common problem on its head. Properly referred to as a case mapping collision, it’s the story of different Unicode characters getting mapped to the same upper or lowercase equivalent.

'ß'.toLowerCase() === 'SS'.toLowerCase() // true
// Note the Turkish dotless i
'John@Gıthub.com'.toUpperCase() === 'John@Github.com'.toUpperCase()

GitHub stores all email addresses in their lowercase form. When a user sends a password reset, GitHub’s logic worked like this: Take the email address that requested a password reset, convert to lower case, and look up the account that uses the converted email address. That by itself wouldn’t be a problem, but the reset is then sent to the email address that was requested, not the one on file. In retrospect, this is an obvious flaw, but without the presence of Unicode and the possibility of a case mapping collision, would be a perfectly safe practice.

This flaw seems to have been fixed quite some time ago, but was only recently disclosed. It’s also a novel problem affecting Unicode that we haven’t covered. Interestingly, my research has turned up an almost identical problem at Spotify, back in 2013.
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