Ignazio Aleo 🏳️‍🌈

New supply chain attack this time for npm axios, the most popular HTTP client library with 300M weekly downloads. Scanning my system I found a use imported from googleworkspace/cli from a few days ago when I was experimenting with gmail/gcal cli. The installed version (luckily) resolved to an unaffected 1.13.5, but the project dependency is not pinned, meaning that if I did this earlier today the code would have resolved to latest and I'd be pwned. It's possible to personally defend against these to some extent with local settings e.g. release-age constraints, or containers or etc, but I think ultimately the defaults of package management projects (pip, npm etc) have to change so that a single infection (usually luckily fairly temporary in nature due to security scanning) does not spread through users at random and at scale via unpinned dependencies. More comprehensive article: stepsecurity.io/blog/axios-c…

Software horror: litellm PyPI supply chain attack. Simple `pip install litellm` was enough to exfiltrate SSH keys, AWS/GCP/Azure creds, Kubernetes configs, git credentials, env vars (all your API keys), shell history, crypto wallets, SSL private keys, CI/CD secrets, database passwords. LiteLLM itself has 97 million downloads per month which is already terrible, but much worse, the contagion spreads to any project that depends on litellm. For example, if you did `pip install dspy` (which depended on litellm>=1.64.0), you'd also be pwnd. Same for any other large project that depended on litellm. Afaict the poisoned version was up for only less than ~1 hour. The attack had a bug which led to its discovery - Callum McMahon was using an MCP plugin inside Cursor that pulled in litellm as a transitive dependency. When litellm 1.82.8 installed, their machine ran out of RAM and crashed. So if the attacker didn't vibe code this attack it could have been undetected for many days or weeks. Supply chain attacks like this are basically the scariest thing imaginable in modern software. Every time you install any depedency you could be pulling in a poisoned package anywhere deep inside its entire depedency tree. This is especially risky with large projects that might have lots and lots of dependencies. The credentials that do get stolen in each attack can then be used to take over more accounts and compromise more packages. Classical software engineering would have you believe that dependencies are good (we're building pyramids from bricks), but imo this has to be re-evaluated, and it's why I've been so growingly averse to them, preferring to use LLMs to "yoink" functionality when it's simple enough and possible.