I worked for one company where we were super conservative. Every external component was versioned. Nothing was updated without review and usually after it had plenty of soak time. Pretty much everything built from source code (compilers, kernel etc.). Builds [build servers/infra] can't reach the Internet at all and there's process around getting any change in. We reviewed all relevant CVEs as they came out to make a call on if they apply to us or not and how we mitigate or address them.

Then I moved to another company where we had builds that access the Internet. We upgrade things as soon as they come out. And people think this is good practice because we're getting the latest bug fixes. CVEs are reviewed by a security team.

Then a startup with a mix of other practices. Some very good. But we also had a big CVE debt. e.g. we had secure boots on our servers and encrypted drives. We had a pretty good grasp on securing components talking to each other etc.

Everyone seems to think they are doing the right thing. It's impossible to convince the "frequent upgrader" that maybe that's a risk in terms of introducing new issues. We as an industry could really use a better set of practices. Example #1 for me is better in terms of dependency management. In general company #1 had well established security practices and we had really secure products.

I would rather work with a company that updates continuously, while also building security into multiple layers so that weaknesses in one layer can be mitigated by others.

For example, at one company I worked for, they created an ACL model for applications that essentially enforced rules like: “Application X in namespace A can communicate with me.” This ACL coordinated multiple technologies working together, including Kubernetes NetworkPolicies, Linkerd manifests with mTLS, and Entra ID application permissions. As a user, it was dead simple to use and abstracted away a lot of things i do not know that well.

The important part is not the specific implementation, but the mindset behind it.

An upgrade can both fix existing issues and introduce new ones. However, avoiding upgrades can create just as many problems — if not more — over time.

At the same time, I would argue that using software backed by a large community is even more important today, since bugs and vulnerabilities are more likely to receive attention, scrutiny, and timely fixes.

Web pages handled by browsers. Linux desktop running code without sandbox is reckless, relied on verification by distro maintainers, does not work the moment users run proprietary software.

Programming language packages issue only because we don't have zero trust for modules — no restrictions to open socket or file system. Issue is not count, pure function leftPad can't hurt you.

Realistically, most folks don't get paid to mitigate long term risks by deviation from the common (and more efficient) practice.

Big companies have security roles on multiple levels, enforcing policies and not allowing devs to just install any package. That's not new but started maybe 15 years ago.

I am feeling really uncomfortable sitting on a large React project.

Whether to do constant npm upgrades to keep the high-priority security issues count at zero (for what seems like about 15 minutes), or whether to hang back a bit to avoid catching the big one that everyone knows is coming real soon now.

Not enjoying npm at all.

lim (num_packages_in_system -> inf) p(successful_supply_chain_attack) = 1

My pet theory is that package managers will one day be seen like we see object-oriented programming today. As something that was once popular but that we've since grown out of. It's also a design flaw that I see in cargo/Rust. Having to import 3rd party packages with who-knows-what dependencies to do pretty much anything, from using async to parsing JSON, it's supply chain vulnerability baked into the language philosophy. npm is no better, but I'm mentioning Rust specifically because it's an otherwise security-conscious language.

Indeed - one year ago we floated the idea it is better to write your code if you can, than get third parties. But it was a heresy at the time to consider LLMm filling the gaps.

Today I’m limiting the exposure to dependencies more than ever, and particularly for things that take few hundred lines to implement. It’s a paradigm shift, no less.

I've been wanting a capability based security model for years. Argued about it here in fact. Capabilities are kind of an object pointer with associated permissions - like a unix file descriptor.

We should have:

- OS level capabilities. Launched programs get passed a capability token from the shell (or wherever you launched the program from). All syscalls take a capability as the first argument. So, "open path /foo" becomes open(cap, "/foo"). The capability could correspond to a fake filesystem, real branch of your filesystem, network filesystem or really anything. The program doesn't get to know what kind of sandbox it lives inside.

- Library / language capabilities. When I pull in some 3rd party library - like an npm module - that library should also be passed a capability too, either at import time or per callsite. It shouldn't have read/write access to all other bytes in my program's address space. It shouldn't have access to do anything on my computer as if it were me! The question is: "What is the blast radius of this code?" If the library you're using is malicious or vulnerable, we need to have sane defaults for how much damage can be caused. Calling lib::add(1, 2) shouldn't be able to result in a persistent compromise of my entire computer.

SeL4 has fast, efficient OS level capabilities. Its had them for years. They work great. They're fast - faster than linux in many cases. And tremendously useful. They allow for transparent sandboxing, userland drivers, IPC, security improvements, and more. You can even run linux as a process in sel4. I want an OS that has all the features of my linux desktop, but works like SeL4.

Unfortunately, I don't think any programming language has the kind of language level capabilities I want. Rust is really close. We need a way to restrict a 3rd party crate from calling any unsafe code (including from untrusted dependencies). We need to fix the long standing soundness bugs in rust. And we need a capability based standard library. No more global open() / listen() / etc. Only openat(), and equivalents for all other parts of the OS.

If LLMs keep getting better, I'm going to get an LLM to build all this stuff in a few years if nobody else does it first. Security on modern desktop operating systems is a joke.

Most people will avoid sticking things in their mouth by default. They don't wait for the microbial cultures to come back positive to say no.

We need a cultural shift toward code hygiene, which isn't really any different from the norms most cultures develop around food. It's a mix of crude heuristics but the sense of "eeew" is keeping billions of people alive.

So, to play Pandora, what if the net effect of uncovering all these unknown attack vectors is it actually empties the holsters of every national intelligence service around the world? Just an idea I have been playing with. Say it basically cleans up everything and everyone looking for exploits has to start from scratch except “scratch” is now a place where any useful piece of software has been fuzz tested, property tested and formally verified.

Assuming we survive the gap period where every country chucks what they still have at their worst enemies, I mean. I suppose we can always hit each other with animal bones.

Do you ride an R1?

> It's impossible to convince the "frequent upgrader" that maybe that's a risk in terms of introducing new issues

I would count myself as a "frequent upgrader" - I admin a bunch of Ubuntu machines and typically set them to auto-update each night. However, I am aware of the risks of introducing new issues, but that's offset by the risks of not upgrading when new bugs are found and patched. There's also the issue of organisations that fall far behind on versions of software which then creates an even bigger problem, though this is more common with Windows/proprietary software as you have less control over that. At least with Linux, you can generally find ways to install e.g. old versions of Java that may be required for specific tools.

There's no simple one-size-fits-all and it depends on the organisation's pool of skills as to whether it's better to proactively upgrade or to reluctantly upgrade at a slower pace. In my experience, the bugs introduced by new versions of software are easier to fix/workaround than the various issues of old software versions.

Well one thing is, there are package updates that could masquerade a backdoor much like XZ Utils[1].

The post in question points to dependency package managers however not system packages, such as NPM, which has pre and post build scripts, install scripts, etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor

OP is suggesting that a supply chain attack would be bad now, and to reduce that risk by not installing/updating NPM packages.

> If everyone starts waiting a week, their exploits will wait 2 weeks

It's much easier to break into an NPM/Github account and push malicious commits in the few hours a maintainer is sleeping than it is to push something out and not have it noticed for 2 weeks.

There are lists of attacks which had an exposure window which was much shorter than 2 weeks:

https://daniakash.com/posts/simplest-supply-chain-defense/ https://blog.yossarian.net/2025/11/21/We-should-all-be-using...

> Everyone seems to think they are doing the right thing

I like to think people would agree more on the appropriate method if they saw the risk as large enough.

If you could convince everyone that a nuclear bomb would get dropped on their heads (or a comparably devastating event) if a vulnerability gets in, I highly doubt a company like #2 would still believe they're doing things optimally, for example.

You forgot case #4: Worked at a startup where the frontend team thought it was a good idea to use lock files during development, but to do a "fresh" install of all dependecies during the deployment step.

And yes, they still thought they were doing the right thing.

I think the author was suggesting "wait a week" as a one-time wait for fixes to be written and patches distributed for these specific prematurely-disclosed vulnerabilities, not an on-going suggestion for delaying all updates. But otherwise I agree with you.

Rust is quite bad on this, having to rely on external crates for error handling or macros is even worse than what async runtime to pick up.

Yes, I mean crates like anyerror and syn.

Capabilities have a lot of serious design problems which is why no mainstream language has them. Because this comes up so often on HN I wrote an essay explaining the issues here:

https://blog.plan99.net/why-not-capability-languages-a8e6cbd...

But as pointed out by others, this particular exploit wouldn't be stopped by capabilities. Nor would it be stopped by micro-kernels. The filesystem is a trusted entity on any OS design I'm familiar with as it's what holds the core metadata about what components have what permissions. If you can exploit the filesystem code, you can trivially obtain any permission. That the code runs outside of the CPU's supervisor mode means nothing.

The only techniques we have to stop bugs like this are garbage collection or use of something like Rust's affine type system. You could in principle write a kernel in a language like C#, Java or Kotlin and it would be immune to these sorts of bugs.

The billions of burgers served by fast food franchises with long histories of poisoning people would argue that delicious convenience overrides the hygiene instinct.

Which is to say: Hiding the sausage-making is a core aspect of what makes supply chains profitable.

Having casually read into a few recent incidents the vector has often been outside of software. A lot of mis-configurations or simply attacking the human in the chain. And nation states have basically unbounded resources for everything from bribes, insiders, and even standing up entire companies.

Will need those animal bones if all the industrial control systems get turned against us

Nuclear might be airgapped but what about water, power…?

well then let's wait a month or even two months. The point of the wait period is primarily to avoid the new installation of exploits, not the execution of already installed exploits.

Every dependency compromise that I can remember "in the past few months" were discovered in hours, if not minutes (litllm, axios, bitwarden CLI, Checkmarx docker images, Pytorch lightning, intercom/intercom-php). What's more, the discovery of these compromises did not at all rely on whether the compromises were actively used.

That's why I don't understand:

> If everyone starts waiting a week, their exploits will wait 2 weeks

A popular package has more exposure. When the artefact is published, the entire world can see it. Hopefully some people check the diff between versions. But without any delays then you could be hit by exploits nobody has seen yet.

Yeah, Stuxnet was dormant for a year until execution.

This is why cooldowns have space for patches.

The proof of concept code is out before patches are available for any distro.

Even better, only use company vetted repos, everyone is forbidded to install directly from the Internet repos.

This naturally doesn't work outside corporations.

The supply chain attack in this case, would be injecting the exploit on a ci/cd system and escalating the local user who runs the npm code to root.

The proper response from them and you, should be to make sure to have some isolatin between user space and root like gvisor.

yeah but i mean installing an npm package in a container is giving it low privilege access

If I'm being really frank, are system updates not more disruptive, destructive and result in more data loss and downtime than all the attacks you'll experience in your lifetime? (unless you're a high value business target ofc, I'm talking for personal machines)

In my book, having unattended-upgrades or windows update run amok on your system is functionally worse than a rootkit.

Only to be thrown out of the windows with a plain "curl | sh".

The industry hasn't grown out of OOP. Go look at any major production codebase businesses rely on and it's fully of objects and classes, including new codebases made very recently.

Package managers aren't going anywhere. Even languages that historically bet on large standard libraries have been giving up on that over time (e.g. Java's stdlib comes with XML support but not JSON).

Unfortunately, LLMs are also not cheap enough to just create whole new PL ecosystems from scratch. So we have to focus on the lowest hanging fruits here. That means making sandboxing and containers far more available and easy for developers. Nobody should run "npm install" outside a sandbox.

But you can't expect the language std to supply you with every package under the sun.

This replaces supply chain trust with the trust in the LLM and the provider you're using. Even if you exclude model devs from your threat model and are running the LLM yourself, it's still an uninterpretable black box that is trained on the web data which can be and is manipulated precisely to attack LLMs during training. So this approach still needs proper supply chain security.

There are a lot of libs you really can't justify implementing from scratch. Mathjs and node-mysql jump to mind. Poisoned chains build up from small dependencies, and clearly staying on top of your dependency chain should be a full time job - if anyone was willing to pay someone to do that full time.

Note that capabilities would not help for those bugs we are discussing today.

Those exploits are in kernel, and the userspace is only calling the normal, allowed calls. Removing global open()/listen()/etc.. with capability-based versions would still allow one to invoke the same kernel bugs.

(Now, using microkernel like seL4 where the kernel drivers are isolated _would_ help, but (1) that's independent from what userspace does, you can have POSIX layer with seL4 and (2) that would be may more context switches, so a performance drop)

Have you heard of pledge in OpenBSD?

I prefer it’s model of declaring this is what I want to use, any calls to code outside that error out.

Most people start out as kids that does exactly that.

> They don't wait for the microbial cultures to come back positive to say no.

They dont wait for the cultures to come back negative to say yes either. They just eat what they are served.

That means going back to disabling Javascript or only allowing widely used, well-maintained Javascript libraries.

TBH this is a pretty good way of looking at it. Yeah we're seeing an explosion of vulnerabilities being found right now, but that (hopefully) means those vulnerabilities are all being cleaned up and we're entering a more hardened era of software. Minus the software packages that are being intentionally put out as exploits, of course. Maybe some might say it's too optimistic and naive, but I think you have a good point.

I think it will be an arms race in the future as well. Easier to fix known vulnerabilities automatically, but also easier to find new ones and the occasionally AI fuckup instead of the occasionally human fuckup.

New software is being generated faster than it can be adequately tested. We are in the same place we’ve always been; except everything is moving much too fast.

This assumes that there are no new exploits being generated.

We're seeing maintainers retreat from maintaining because the amount of AI slop being pushed at them is too much. How many are just going to hand over the maintenance burden to someone else, and how many of those new maintainers are going to be evil?

The essential problem is that our entire system of developing civilisation-critical software depends on the goodwill of a limited set of people to work for free and publish their work for everyone else to use. This was never sustainable, or even sensible, but because it was easy we based everything on it.

We need to solve the underlying problem: how to sustainably develop and maintain the software we need.

A large part of this is going to have to be: companies that use software to generate profits paying part of those profits towards the development and maintenance of that software. It just can't work any other way. How we do this is an open question that I have no answers for.

Faults are injected into the code at a constant rate per developer. Then there's the intentional injections.

Auto-installing random software is the problem. It was a problem when our parents did it, why would it be a good idea for developers to do it?

What we are seeing so far come out of the AI agent era is reduced not increased code quality. The few advances are by far negated by all the slop that's thrown around and that's unlikely to change.

> any useful piece of software has been fuzz tested, property tested and formally verified.

That would require effort. Human effort and extra token cost. Not going to happen, people want to rather move fast an break things.

I think you misunderstood the article. The proposal isn't wait a week after Software has been published before installing it. It's in the next seven days starting now, just don't, because you probably don't have patches for these vulnerabilities and even if you do there's probably more scary vulnerabilities about to be discovered.

For ios, rebooting your phone is extremely effective at removing exploits. The boot chain attestation stuff can verify the system is in a known state. If you are ultra paranoid you could enable lockdown mode which preemptively disables the entrypoints for exploits. So far I don't believe there has been any exploit which works with lockdown mode enabled.

More a case for something like this from Show HN three months ago

https://github.com/artifact-keeper

An artifact manager. Only get what you approve. So you can get fast updates when needed and consistently known stable when you need it. Does need a little config override - easy work.

I had my own janky tooling for something like it. This is a good project.

So you get security updates late too? Many vulnerabilities are in the wild for years before being noticed, and patched.

Once noticed, that's where the exploit explosion erupts, excited exploiters everywhere, emboldened... enticed... excessively encouraged, by your delayed updates.

IMO, the most sustainable version is either the linux distros/bsd ports/homebrew models. You don't push new libraries to the public registry, instead you write a packaging script that gets reviewed for every new changes.

Another model is Perl's CPAN where you publish source files only.

> if they saw the risk as large enough.

If you expose people to the true risks instead of allowing them to be ignorant, the conclusion that they might come to is that they shouldn’t develop software at all.

NPM supply-chain attacks spread really quickly.

If a popular NPM package was compromised and included a copy.fail exploit, it would make lots of systems vulnerable to root privilege escalation.

The patches for the latest vulnerabilities aren’t even out yet. So it would be a real bad time for a new supply chain attack since it would get root on pretty much every system.

> And the advice isn't just "update your kernel" because we are still finding new related issues?

The advice isn't just "update your kernel" because there is no update. The latest vulnerability (the one discovered after copy.fail) still has no fix.

npm can run on linux.

I remember there was a trend with some UK Influencers using some "Ladder and a High-vis" tricks to enter places for a while to show how rough physical security is [0]. I believe its the youtuber, Max Fosh, who managed to do it back to back at the International Security Expo, first in the UK [1] and then in the US [2], with the fake names 'Rob Banks' and 'Nick Everything'.

I've studied security culture before and in most cases everything comes down to a sliding scale with security on one side and convenience/accessibility on the other, the more secure something is, the less accessible it is and vice versa.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTI0SeyhAPA

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM3imMiERdU

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmgLwxK8TvA

If `docker` is already there, why even bother with `sudo` when you can just:

    docker run --rm -it -v '/:/mnt' -u 'root' 'alpine' '/bin/sh' '-l'

Chances are that the person who set up Docker didn't do it properly.

Wouldn’t you prefer to pin to SHA hashes? Or does your package manager cloud-side ensure immutability of releases?

Those things scare the crap out of me…

Even worse are the “extension packs” that combine some normal things and one wonky thing nobody’s ever heard of…

FreeBSD is quite lax when it comes to security- especially defaults and configs.

The preference is for usability over security.

Famously: https://vez.mrsk.me/freebsd-defaults

I appreciate your work on the project, but I can’t in good conscience suggest people switch while are such bad defaults.

Has everyone here already forgotten about the WireGuard tire fire?

https://lwn.net/Articles/850098

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26507507

tl;dr: deeply insecure WireGuard implementation committed directly into the FreeBSD kernel with zero review.

Was this process problem fixed?

Been constructing a lot of infrastructure servers recently, almost all of them FreeBSD VMs running under bhyve on FreeBSD physical hosts. It's a very simple, clean, pleasant environment to work in. And they all run tarsnap. ;-)

While I am sure FreeBSD is more secure than your average Linux distro, I sure hope they are using these new AI models to harden everything.

Nothing :D

Either my reading of your comment is wrong or you misunderstood the supply chain comment by OP I think: what they mean is that a supply chain attack that gets the exploit on a system would be great now because the reported vulns are unfixed pretty much everywhere

To be fair npm makes (made?) it weirdly hard to use lock files so a lot of people did that by mistake. And when you do use lock, it reinstalls every time so a retagged package can just silently update.

Really? You think the alternate mode where you're running 5-year-old versions of stuff with tons of known security flaws is better?

Yep, that was my intent.

Of course, why didn't anyone think of that ? I bet if someone started to ship software that has no errors they'll make a huge amount of money, especially from all the people that are security-minded !

Please grow a brain.

The whole (mistaken) belief that Linux and macOS didn't require AV was based on the execute bit being present, something Microsoft fixed back in XP by making downloaded files as such and preventing them from being opened trivially.

If you have code execution, you can attack the OS.

Often convenience and security are at odds, but `export HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1` is more convenient and more secure.

I'm somewhat skeptical here, because I notified the FreeBSD security team of a vulnerability a few years ago, and I never got a response, even after a follow-up email a few weeks later. To be fair, my report was about a non-core component, and the vulnerability wouldn't be very easy to exploit, but Debian, OpenBSD, SUSE, and Gentoo all patched it within a week [0].

That being said, I'm not suggesting that anyone should judge an entire OS based off of how they handle a single minor report, since everything else that I've seen suggests that FreeBSD takes security reports quite seriously. But then you could also use this same argument for the Linux kernel bug, since it's pretty rare for a patch to be mismanaged like this there too :)

[0]: https://www.maxchernoff.ca/p/luatex-vulnerabilities#timeline

FreeBSD didn’t have user land ASLR until 2019 and, amongst other mitigations, still doesn’t have kASLR. It’s not a serious operating system for people who care about security. If you want FreeBSD and security take Shawn Webb’s HardenedBSD.

If you are switching to a BSD for security reasons, why FreeBSD? Isn't OpenBSD the super secure one? Sorry, it's been a while since I've looked at those projects

There’s always a guy. It’s great that your favorite distro is definitely safer. An order of magnitude fewer exploits will mean only a few thousand or so, I suppose. Ozymandis used Gentoo.

Also funny they never show Debian in those tests/videos.

Run everything as sudo so they cant escalate any further ;)

This. Lost hours from the hours running the updates, lost hours from the occasional faulty upgrade, and every now and again it's fail spectacularly and need a restore from backup to return to productivity. No matter if it's Ubuntu LTS or non-LTS, every six months there's always something radically changed. OpenSUSE Leap has the same problem. I'm looking at Tumbleweed but a new version every week is going to break occasionally. Gentoo build-from-source is going to have weirdness every now and again, if not utter ruin. MacOS updates yearly, and brings horrors with every point zero release. Windows is Windows, and those problems are well known. I don't think there's a way around it with the current offerings.

It's a problem we have to live with for the sake of progress and for security updates. Every machine needs downtime for maintenance on a periodic, often-scheduled basis. It might cost time but avoiding updates is not a good plan.

Aside from dodgy updates that have to run as root to install, if you have passwordless sudo it's more dangerous than any broken package or local-only privilege escalation exploit. I'll wager many have it set up that way, because typing passwords is tiresome.

Well it needs, and in particular if you use an adversarial model tuned to inject malware. Not sure if it was researched though to this degree and no provider would tell you anyways I guess :)

Of course, and thank God for them. But many more look more complicated and serve more use case than you typically actually need. Like - how much of ffmpeg you need, well depends on the project. And perhaps someone is happily tearing it down with LLM to get precisely these parts (not me, though I enjoy doing it to LLMs and other models).

But being able to have agents implement pelr5 in rust and make it faster and more secure raises many questions towards the role of open source and consequences of security and supply chain risks.

> Note that capabilities would not help for those bugs we are discussing today.

Yes they would. Copyfail uses a bug in the linux kernel to write to arbitrary page table entries. A kernel like SeL4 puts the filesystem in a separate process. The kernel doesn't have a filesystem page table entry that it can corrupt.

Even if the bug somehow got in, the exploit chain uses the page table bug to overwrite the code in su. This can be used to get root because su has suid set. In a capability based OS, there is no "su" process to exploit like this.

A lot of these bugs seem to come from linux's monolithic nature meaning (complex code A) + (complex code B) leads to a bug. Microkernels make these sort of problems much harder to exploit because each component is small and easier to audit. And there's much bigger walls up between sections. Kernel ALG support wouldn't have raw access to overwrite page table entries in the first place.

> (2) that would be may more context switches, so a performance drop

I've heard this before. Is it actually true though? The SeL4 devs claim the context switching performance in sel4 is way better than it is in linux. There are only 11 syscalls - so optimising them is easier. Invoking a capability (like a file handle) in sel4 doesn't involve any complex scheduler lookups. Your process just hands your scheduler timeslice to the process on the other end of the invoked capability (like the filesystem driver).

But SeL4 will probably have more TLB flushes. I'm not really sure how expensive they are on modern silicon.

I'd love to see some real benchmarks doing heavy IO or something in linux and sel4. I'm not really sure how it would shake out.

A stdlib doesn't have to provide everything under the sun in order to be helpful here.

Languages with rich standard libraries provide enough common components that it's feasible to build things using only a small handful of external dependencies. Each of those can be carefully chosen, monitored, and potentially even audited, by an individual or small team.

That doesn't make the resulting software exploit-proof, of course, but it seems to me much less risky than an ecosystem where most programs pull in hundreds of dependencies, all of which receive far less scrutiny than a language's standard library.

It's a condensed statement. There was a time when I would start a new programming project thinking about class hierarchies, maybe drawing some UML diagrams. I don't do that anymore, and I don't believe it's very common for greenfield projects anymore, but educate me if that's wrong. We've kept some of the good ideas from OOP like namespaces and interfaces and we use them in slightly different contexts now, where OOP may even still be technically possible, but it's not the primary way of doing things anymore. I believe, or at least hope, we will see a similar kind of evolution for package managers. Where it's still possible to use other people's code, but things like left-pad or is-even is no longer how it's commonly being used, even if it may still technically be possible.

And kids do not decide what to buy and how to prefer that food for exactly that reason.

Exactly! They rely heuristics like that they are being served in a clean public restaurant which is presumably following health code, and is staffed by people who follow standard norms on hygiene. In some countries the norm is for the kitchen to be visible so the patrons can take a peak themselves.

If the restaurant has a foul smell and the food is served by a twitchy waiter who insists that the food totally free, I think most people will think twice.

To be fair, to some extent that’s up to us. Time to get cleaning, I guess.

There is an xkcd about that i think

You could still have security bumps happening (like dependabot).

curl ... | sudo bash

yolo!

I think it's even more specific.

From TFA:

> Right now would be one of the best times for a supply chain attack via NPM to hit hard.

Given the local kernel root exploits, people pulling npm dependencies have an extra high chance of getting rooted. This includes test systems, build systems, the web server running node.js backend, etc. etc. etc.

This means that there is a significantly greater chance that whatever software you download (not necessarily npm-based) on the internet in these couple days has been unknowingly infected with backdoors, simply due to the fact that the vast majority of servers out there that use npm code have easily exploitable vulnerabilities.

I agree with the prediction but not the timing. We won't enter a more hardened era of software until after a long period of security vulnerabilities.

Rivers caught on fire for a hundred years before the EPA was formed.

This is exactly the feeling I have. First: excessive growth of dependencies fueled by free components.

* with internet access to FOSS via sourceforge and github we got an abundance of building blocks

* with central repositories like CPAN, npm, pip, cargo and docker those building blocks became trivially easy to use

Then LLMs and agents added velocity to building apps and producing yet more components, feeding back into the dependency chain. Worse: new code with unattributed reuse of questionable patterns found in unknowable versions of existing libraries. That is, implicit dependencies on fragments multitude of packages.

This may all end well ultimately, but we're definitely in for a bumpy ride.

At least with our Renovate config, all dependencies have a 7 day cooldown, but marked security updates are immediate.

Attackers can’t push a security update without going through the reporting process (e.g. Github CVE), so they can’t necessarily abuse that easily.

FYI a retagged package would result in a different SHA512 integrity sum and fail the installation process. It won't "just silently update".

Anyway, the point of parent and me wasn't that it was considered to be a "mistake", but people thinking they "are doing the right thing".

No, you read it right. I just misunderstood the post's message as "these exploits will enable more supply chain attacks". I'll probably delete my comment since it's debating a strawman. It is absolutely right that these exploits might enable these attacks to have a larger impact. I still don't think that I agree with the message since a malicious npm package already installed can get its payloads from a C2 server, it doesn't need an npm update.

What part of "We reviewed all relevant CVEs as they came out to make a call on if they apply to us or not and how we mitigate or address them" gave you that impression?

Oh! Not GP but skimmed too quickly

>running 5-year-old versions of stuff with tons of known security flaws

No one in this thread proposed that, or anything that could be reasonably assumed to have meant that.

I can’t comment on the behavior of ancient npm versions, but with modern npm I would not even know how to skip using a lockfile.

As for the parent comment about not using the lockfile for the production build, that’s just incredibly incompetent.

Maybe they should hire someone who knows what they are doing. Contrary to the popular beliefs of backend engineers online, you also need some competency to do frontend properly.

In this case what’s needed is „npm ci“ instead of „npm install“ or better „pnpm install —frozen-lockfile“.

Pnpm will also do that automatically if the CI environment variable is set.

Is there anywhere that provides a good overview of the various OS protection technologies/approaches that exist and which OSes have implemented them?

There is currently only method to prove absence of errors, this method is not LLMs, it's formal verification methods. Currently only very little formal verification is used in software industry, static type checking.

Problem here is Brew does things in an anti-unix way by default, the auto updating of packages being the prominent reason.

I personally switched away from macOS with this being one of the reasons, after having realized brew will eventually compromise my system with their antics.

Linux Kernel doesn’t differentiate between security bugs and other bugs, which is the main complaint here I think. They have the same process.

So the issue is bigger than the mishandling of a single issue, it’s a fundamental process issue around security for one of the most impactful projects in the entire space.

I haven't switched to BSD but I've been thinking about it for a while. I just saw Vultr has both FreeBSD and OpenBSD!

Calling FreeBSD "just a distro" is verging on insulting. It's an operating system.

Well, as they're a FreeBSD dev, I would be surprised if they pointed anyone in a different direction.

Do you know if this exploit works on Docker containers? And if so, I assume it just allows escalation WITHIN the container? So this attack is scary for Linux desktops and servers, but a fully containerized system like common on CI/CD should be good. Right?

I don't have an answer what the alternative is going to look like. But smarter people than me may find something. C/C++ are doing fine without package managers. Go at least has a more capable standard library than Rust. But I'm not sure if Go's import github approach is the answer.

One idea I've been entertaining is to not allow transitive imports in packages. It would probably lead to far fewer and more capable packages, and a bigger standard library. Much harder to imagine a left-pad incident in such an ecosystem.

> or only allowing widely used, well-maintained Javascript libraries.

That isn't a guarantee either, just last month someone compromised the Axios library.

Yes. But its nowhere near as powerful as capabilities.

- Pledge requires the program drop privileges. Process level caps move the "allowed actions" outside of an application. And they can do that without the application even knowing. This would - for example - let you sandbox an untrusted binary.

- Pledge still leaves an entire application in the same security zone. If your process needs network and disk access, every part of the process - including 3rd party libraries - gets access to the network and disk.

- You can reproduce pledge with caps very easily. Capability libraries generally let you make a child capability. So, cap A has access to resources x, y, z. Make cap B with access to only resource x. You could use this (combined with a global "root cap" in your process) to implement pledge. You can't use pledge to make caps.

curl | sh is more prevalent in Linux where you can expect a stable ABI from the kernel and sometimes GNU libc. No such things in BSD land. Packages are built against a release always. They don't maintain binary compatibility.

Yeah.

Right now it kinda feels to me like "Open Source" is the Russian army, assuming their sheer numbers and their huge quantity of equipment much off which is decades old.

Meanwhile attackers and bug hunters are like the Ukrainians, using new, inexpensive, and surprisingly powerful tools that none of the Open Source community has ever seen in the past, and for which it has very little defence capability.

The attackers with cheap drones or LLMs are completely overwhelming the old school who perhaps didn't notice how quickly the world has changed around them, or did notice but cannot do anything about quickly enough.

This is related to a massive annoyance of mine: when I run a piece of software and the system is missing a required dependency, I want the software to *tell me* that dependency is missing so I can make a decision about proceeding or not. Instead it seems that far too often software authors will try and be “clever” by silently installing a bunch of dependencies, either in some directory path specific to the software, or even worse globally.

I run a distro that often causes software like this to break because their silent automatic installation typically makes assumptions about Linux systems which don’t apply to mine. However I fear for the many users of most typical distros (and other OS’ in general as it’s not just a Linux-only issue) who are subject to having all sorts of stuff foisted onto their system with little to no opportunity to easily decide what is being heaped upon them.

Presumably npm exempts security updates from its minimum release age, but even if it doesn't, I think the times where you need an important security update are relatively rare enough that handling the real cases on a case-by-case basis with whitelisting is fine. Outside of Next.js's React2Shell vulnerability last year, I'm not sure I've ever had a security update of a dependency written in a memory-safe language (ie. not C/C++) which I've installed through npm/PyPI/Cargo that patched a security vulnerability that had been making my application exploitable to others in practice. Almost all security vulnerabilities I've personally seen flagged through npm are about things I only use at build-time and are only relevant if a user can create and pass an arbitrary object to the function, which is rarely the case. Most security vulnerabilities I've encountered and fixed in working on web apps were things like XSS, SQL injections, and improperly enforced permissions, and they nearly always happened in the application's own code rather than inside a dependency.

> we're entering a more hardened era of software

This is one force that operates. Another is that, in an effort to avoid depending on such a big attack surface, people are increasingly rolling their own code (with or without AI help) where they might previously have turned to an open source library.

I think the effect will generally be an increase in vulnerabilities, since the hand-rolled code hasn't had the same amount of time soaking in the real world as the equivalent OS library; there's no reason to assume the average author would magically create fewer bugs than the original OS library authors initially did. But the vulnerabilities will have much narrower scope: If you successfully exploit an OS library, you can hack a large fraction of all the code that uses it, while if you successfully exploit FooCorp's hand-rolled implementation, you can only hack FooCorp. This changes the economic incentive of funding vulnerabilities to exploit -- though less now than in the past, when you couldn't just point an LLM at your target and tell it "plz hack".

New code will also use these tools from the get go, hopefully vastly reducing the vulnerabilities that make it to prod to begin with.

That is already how it works. The loner hacker in moms basement working for free on his super critical OSS package is largely a myth. The vast majority of OSS code is contributed by companies paying their employees to work on it.

You are avoiding intentionally to say ‘thanks to LLMs’ or is implicit? As all these recent mega bugs surface with lots of fuzzing and agentic bashing, right ?

If you are already exploited though, I doubt it helps

Does that really scale well? Thanks to cascading dependencies, even a medium sized project can import hundreds of dependencies. Can a developer really review them all to figure out if they are safe and that there's not security fix that was fixed in a newer version of the package?

Isn't blaming AI for that similar to blaming C for buffer overflows?

More people are producing more code because of easier tools. Most code is bad. But that's not the tools fault.

And in the end it is a problem of processes and culture.

Trust me, as someone who has contributed to such a package set, almost nobody is inspecting diffs between upstream versions when updating a package. Only the package definitions themselves are reviewed, but they are typically only version + hash bumps.

Reviewing upstream diffs for every package requires a lot of man hours and most packagers are volunteers. I guess LLMs might help catching some obvious cases.

doesn't `npm ci` prevent that? it fails if something doesn't match the lockfile, and wipes node_modules before running

this is on some ancient node 16 build i was trying to clean up ci for, so not very recent npm

Indeed, when one installs dependencies all over the Internet, or even better, key projects use "curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh" as default suggestion on how to install them, attackers have the work done for them.

Last I read, ASLR is a good thing to have, but overall is usually not difficult to defeat. It's a speed bump, not a brick wall.

I don't think it's reasonable to say that an OS that lacks it isn't "serious" about security.

So you have one example in hand and trash talked FreeBSD’s entire security team. Bold claims are fine but this is lazy.

FreeBSD isn’t secure, I suspect you’re sitting on a pile of 0 days for it?

The person suggesting FreeBSD is a FreeBSD developer (Colin Percival - actually according to Wikipedia FreeBSD engineering lead), would be weird for him to suggest openbsd.

FreeBSD is not a distro

FreeBSD is not a distro. It's not even Linux; it's a completely different kernel and operating system that traces back to even before Linux. It's honestly closer to Darwin than it is to Linux; macOS is technically a BSD. (Not FreeBSD though.)

Debian is probably the best of all the Linuxes, but still suffers from split-brain: If patches are sent upstream first, Debian can't start digesting them until they're already public.

With FreeBSD there's never any question of "who should this get reported to".

How so?

pnpm has this, I think others may also have something similar.

https://pnpm.io/settings#minimumreleaseage

right, a bigger issue is multitenant systems, which are common in academia (I manage several such systems for various experiments). Now, we generally trust the users to not be malicious, but most don't get sudo, because physicists tend to think they know what they're doing when they don't really (except for me, of course).

Something that concerns me more is I use things like gemini-cli or claude-cli via their own, non-sudo accounts with no ssh keys or anything on my laptop, but a LPE means they can find away around such restrictions if they feel like it (and they might).

Personally I'm choosing to keep my home server behind a VPN and to enable Lockdown Mode on my phone and laptop for a while until the dust settles. As well as just limiting the software installed to trusted projects only.

VM isolation would still be safe even with these kernel exploits.

slopcode is a pejorative that means nothing to me. if you have an actual criticism to make, then do it

pnpm has added a new setting, minimumReleaseAge, enabled by default, just to try to mitigate these issues.

Except that a lot of software likely is already broken in fun ways we currently don't know about. That is what makes it such a "fun" challenge. Supply chain attacks are one thing, but CVEs in already released software allowing other attackers are another.

As always, I know most of us work in IT, but things rarely are actually binary.

"we need to push back the timeline on this new infrastructure deploy while we mitigate Copy Fail 2". Problem solved

You'll also find your CI build times and flakey failures can be cut down massively by doing this.

Perhaps, but it makes a huge difference if you're running the vulnerable code in a container or as a different user.

Additionally, use only internal repos.

It's a two-edged sword. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't update.

I think there’s already a big market of supply chain security companies that are proactively scanning dependencies for this sort of thing.

They’re always racing to be the first one to write an article about a case.

NPM seems to have introduced the flag `minimumReleaseAge` for this exact purpose. However even though are many recent references to it[0][1][2] I don't see it anywhere in the NPM documentation.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47513932

[1] https://github.com/npm/cli/issues/8570

[2] https://socket.dev/blog/npm-introduces-minimumreleaseage-and...

When you control the bashrc of some other person, it is already kind of game over.

you raise a really good point. if everyone is doing this at exactly the same lag then it will eventually start hitting groups in sync at the exact same time

this, this is something I don't understand there are a billion ways to gain root once you control the user that regulary uses sudo.

this is only scary for rootless containers as it skips an isolation layer, but we've started shipping distroless containers which are not vulnerable to this due to the fact that they lack priviledge escalation commands such as su or sudo.

never trust software to begin with, sandbox everything you can and don't run it on your machine to begin with if possible.

Write only code is such a bad bad idea. No one is reviewing 20k loc PRS with 15 new dependencies in an afternoon. Sorry it's just not happening I don't care how many years you have been a software engineer. Yet that's the new thing and how we all are supposed to work or else we are all Luddites.

In this case, no insiders broke the embargo. It was reverse engineered from the patch by an unrelated third party and a proof of concept immediately came out of it. At that point, it's kinda fair game.

The dirty frag repo says:

> Because the responsible disclosure schedule and the embargo have been broken, no patch exists for any distribution.

I had to do a double take reading that. It’s written something happened and prevented them from following a schedule but seemingly they chose to release the information. I hope I’m missing something where it was forcibly disclosed elsewhere.

Edit: Moments later I refreshed the homepage and saw the announcement. They do claim to have consulted with maintainers

if you don't already consider responsible disclosure a quaint idea, you may want to grow warm on it

the idea that it exists at all is more or less a gentleman's agreement in the engineering world anyway

If the fix commit is public, so is the issue being fixed.

That's not enough in this case. The suggested mitigation according to the Dirty.Frag github page is to blacklist esp4, esp6 and rxrpc

In C and C++'s case, the batteries included is POSIX + Khronos.

The solution exists, and those are curated package repositories as we have in Linux distributions. In C I can simply install a -dev package and use some library which sees some quality control and security updates from the distribution.

The problem is that the UNIX shell model got very successful and is now also used on other platforms with poor package management, so all the language-level packaging system were created instead. But those did not learn from the lessons of Linux distributions. Cargo is particularly bad.

I’m not trying to say use pledge/unveil to make capabilities, I’m saying use pledge/unveil to limit exposure.

To me it’s easier to get a program to let the system know what it needs vs. try to contain it from the outside.

Anyway, have a good one.

Well this argument was certainly inventive. What a weird impression to have about these things.

Who exactly is the innocent little Ukraine supposed to be that the big bad open source is supposed to be attacking to, what? take their land and make the OSS leader look powerful and successful at acheiving goals to distract from their fundamental awfulness? And who are the North Korean canon fodder purchased by OSS while we're at it?

Yeah it's just like that, practically the same situation. The authors of gnu cp and ls can't wait to get, idk, something apparently, out of the war they started when they attacked, idk, someone apparently.

Hardly an argument against random shell scripts execution, quite often elevated.

Not everyone installs only what is available in pkgsrc.

They stole the axios's npm keys and they uploaded malicious artifacts. They did not takeover the axios's repo. The issue is with packaging and distribution, not with code.

Ruby gems and CPAN have build scripts that rebuild stuff on the user's device (and warn you if they can't find a dependency). But I believe one of the Python's tools that started the trend of downloading binaries instead of building them. Or was it NPM?

> exempts security updates from its minimum release age

If it does, doesn't that defeat the purpose? If a package is compromised, of course the compromiser will just label their new version as a "security update".

Thank you for reminding us all that you AI bros are still the most obnoxious people there are.

The future may be distributed quite unevenly here, as they say, with a divergence between a small amount of "responsible" code in systems which leverage AI defensively, and a larger amount of vibe-coded / prompt-engineered code in systems which don't go through the extra trouble, and in fact create additional risk by cutting corners on human review. I personally know a lot of people using AI to create software faster, but none of them have created special security harnesses a la Mozilla (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/05/mozil...).

It does though, the exploit exists in memory. When you reboot the phone the memory is reset, if it's modified system files, the checksums won't pass and your phone will refuse to boot. Requiring it to be wiped and reinstalled.

These days most exploits can not persist through a reboot due to secureboot and other bootchain attestations. In the boot process, everything loaded gets checksummed and compared to signed signatures from Apple, but this only helps at load time, not while the phone is running. Of course if the phone is not patched, the exploit could be reloaded, but this would require revising a malicious website or reopening a malicious bit of media.

I love the sibling response from @jp...

Also, IME we don't deep dive everything (should we?)

For most stuff we make sure the latest is not-shit and passed test cases. We do have ceremony around version bumps.

Getting persistent root is actually quite difficult on mobile operating systems. iOS famously so, but unless you're running a custom ROM other than Graphene, Android has some solid protections as well.

Regular phone reboots are a security measure at this point.

Yes, that is what is required. Every dependency needs an internal owner and reviewer. Every change needs to be reviewed and brought into the internal repository.

If no one is willing to stand up and say "yes this is safe and of acceptable quality", why use it?

It's a software engineering version of the professional engineering stamp.

We are not in disagreement here. I'm not blaming AI, I'm blaming the culture around its use.

npm ci does indeed prevent that. The issue isn't really with npm in specific. Rather, it's with build tools like Microsoft's Oryx, which get pushed in GitHub Actions if you're using Azure App Service. That one by default uses `npm install` on older versions (it's been changed nowadays, but Azure's generated action files have a bad habit of generating with older versions of the actions they're using), even though it's specifically meant for CI usage.

In general, use of npm ci is usually sparsely documented - most node projects you can find just recommend using npm install during the setup, suggesting a failure in promoting it's availability (I only know of it because I got frustrated that the lockfile kept clogging up git commits whenever I added dependencies with what looked like auto-generated build-time junk).

Not really talking about upstream. Most supply attacks I’ve heard about are stolen secrets and artifacts uploading. They’re not about repositories or websites being taken over. As the packaging scripts are often in repos, you detect easily if people are trying to update where upstream points to.

>Last I read, ASLR is a good thing to have, but overall is usually not difficult to defeat.

For local attackers there may be easier avenues to leak the ASLR slide, but for remote attackers it's almost universally agreed it significantly raises the bar.

>I don't think it's reasonable to say that an OS that lacks it isn't "serious" about security.

When they implemented it in 2019 it had been an 18-year-old mitigation. If you are serious about security, you implement everything that raises the bar. The term "defense-in-depth" exists for a reason, and ASLR is probably one of the easiest and most effective defense-in-depth measures you can implement that doesn't necessarily require changes from existing code other than compiling with -pie.

> key projects use "curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh" as default suggestion

This is exactly why some (including me) don't take these projects seriously. Like you claim to design a language for security, and this is how you tell me to install it????

Darwin is its own thing really. There are parts from BSD, there are also parts from Mach and there are also unique parts.

> Go at least has a more capable standard library than Rust.

Many Golang projects I see in the wild will import a number of dependencies with significant feature overlap with sections of the standard library, or even be intended as a replacement for them. So it seems that having an expansive stdlib isn’t sufficient to avoid deep dependency trees, it probably helps to some degree but it’s definitely not a panacea.

>C/C++ are doing fine without package managers.

They're not either, every one of these projects contains a gigantic vendor/ folder full of unmaintained libraries, modified so much that keeping up with the latest changes is impossible so they're stuck with whatever version they copied back in 2009.

Typically when hand-rolling code you implement only what you require for your use-case, while a library will be more general purpose. As a consequence of doing more, have more code and more bugs.

Also, even seemingly trivial libraries can have bugs. The infamous leftpad library didn't handle certain edge doses properly.

For supply chain security and bug count, I'll take a focused custom implementation of specific features over a library full of generalized functionality.

If I hand roll my logging library, I unlikely include automatic LDAP request based on message text (infamous Log4j vulnerability).

>there's no reason to assume the average author would magically create fewer bugs than the original OS library authors initially did

Have you read this old code? It's terrible and written with no care at all to security often in C. AI is much much better at writing code.

I'm thinking of projects like curl [0]

this is a cornerstone of modern software development. If it died, or if got taken over by a malicious entity, every single company on the planet would have an immediate security problem. Yet the experience of that maintainer is bad verging on terrible [1].

We need to do better than this.

[0] https://curl.se/docs/governance.html

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/1034966/

The sad truth about open source in 2026 is that it does not serve the society the way it is advertised or did back in the 90s.

Ask yourself why Mythos was so easily able to develop a remote STACK buffer overflow vulnerability.

What does the D in BSD stand for again?

> Debian can't start digesting them until they're already public

Not sure what you mean by this. Debian is able to handle coordinated disclosures (when they're actually coordinated), and get embargoed security updates out rapidly without breaking the embargo.

Is there some other aspect of this that you're referencing?

I'm reminded of another legendary HN thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

First, if you control the account of the administrator, you already have a worst case scenario. Second, this is why distros tell you to not use sudo. The purpose of sudo is to give some people the ability to run a very specific program with elevated privileges that wouldn't be allowed otherwise, while you don't want them to have any other administrative rights. If you want someone to be an admin over the system, just give them the root password.

I doubt your “distroless” container is any safer for this vulnerability .

Infecting sudo just makes for a quick demo.

If your container has different processes at different user ids, the exploit would still be effective.

It would likely also be able to “modify” read only files mapped from the host.

I'm personally waiting to be downgraded to simply being called "lazy".

When I see pages of obviously generated prose being submitted as any kind of documentation, my eyes just glaze over. I feel so guilty sharing similar stuff too, though to my credit, at least I always lead with a self-written TLDR, the slop is just for reference. But it's so bad, like genuinely distressing tier. I don't want to read all that junk, and more and more gets produced.

Prose type docs have always been my Achilles heel, and this is like the worst possible evolution of that.

For a brief period in the past few weeks, they somehow managed to make a change to ChatGPT Thinking that made it succint. The tone was super fact oriented too. It was honestly like waking up from a fever dream.

I assume that while Mythos may be really good at finding vulnerabilities, lighter models may still do a pretty good job of explaining/exploiting the vulnerability if given the patch which fixes it.

Less a gentleman's agreement and more of a question of economic incentives going away. Companies aren't paying out bounties at the rates they used to (possibly because they've realized there's little financial incentive to do so for most findings) and simultaneously they're being inundated with AI slop findings that somehow have to still be triaged and evaluated.

Thanks.

Discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054182

With copy.fail the security patch wasn't listed as such so there wasn't a lot of attention on the issue as it remained dormant in most kernels for a while.

I don't doubt that the patch reversal + exploit PoC made by a third party is the result of people figuring out how patches work in open source projects like these.

Anyone with access to a good enough LLM can scour through supposedly minor bug fixes that might hide a critical vulnerability rather than doing it all manually. The LLM will probably throw up tons of false positives and miss half the issues, it you only need one or two successes.

I agree that de facto the biggest security flaw in Linux is "okay I'm tired of getting interrupted all day assisting you, I know you're competent, I'll put you on the sudoers list."

But there are a lot of academic and research institutions that actually do have good Linux user management. I worked at a pediatric hospital, and the RHEL HPC admins did not mess around in terms of who was allowed to access which patients' data. As someone who was not an admin, it was a huge pain and it should have been. So this bug has pretty serious implications, seems like anyone at that hospital can abscond with a lot of deidentified data. [research HPC not as sensitive as the clinical stuff, which I think was all Windows Server]

> Due to external factors, the embargo has been broken, so no patch exists for any distribution.

Very odd wording. I assume there’s an interesting/upsetting story here that will come out soon.

> this, this is something I don't understand there are a billion ways to gain root once you control the user that regulary uses sudo.

I won't enter into all the details but... It's totally possible to not have the sudo command (or similar) on a system at all and to have su with the setuid bit off.

On my main desktop there's no sudo command there are zero binaries with the setuid bit set.

The only way to get root involves an "out-of-band" access, from another computer, that is not on the regular network [1].

This setup as worked for me since years. And years. And I very rarely need to be root on my desktop. When I do, I just use my out-of-band connection (from a tiny laptop whose only purpose is to perform root operations on my desktop).

For example today: I logged in as root blocked the three modules with the "dirty page" mitigation suggested by the person who reported the exploit.

You're not faking sudo with a mocking-bird on my machine. You're not using "su" from a regular user account. No userns either (no "insmod", no nothing).

Note that it's still possible to have several non-root users logged in as once: but from one user account, you cannot log in as another. You can however switch to TTY2, TTY3, etc. and log in as another user. And the whole XKCD about "get local account, get everything of importance", ain't valid either in my case.

I'm not saying it's perfect but it's not as simple as "get a local shell, wait until user enters 'sudo', get root". No sudo, no su.

It's brutally simple.

And, the best of all, it's a fully usable desktop: I'm using such a setup since years (I've also got servers, including at home, with Proxmox and VMs etc., but that's another topic).

That's not really that surprising when you think about it. Standard library-provided things are implemented on a basis of working OK for as many scenarios as possible, not on one of being the best possible implementation for every possible scenario.

That particular vulnerability, sure, but there's lots of ways to make mistakes.

I’m seeing a lot of similar things during code reviews of substantially LLM-produced codebases now. Half-baked bad idea that probably leaked from training sets.

You make that sound worse than it is. On the overall topic, you have 0 supply chain risk, and the whole thing is local. Also, your code from 2009 is still valid. That would be a foreign concept in some languages like Python.

Yes, a lot hinges on how little you can get away with implementing for your use case. If you have an XML config file with 3 settings in it, you probably won't need to implement handling of external entities the way a full XML parsing library would, which will close off an entire class of attendant vulnerabilities.

> Also, even seemingly trivial libraries can have bugs. The infamous leftpad library didn't handle certain edge doses properly.

This isn't really an argument in favour of having the average programmer reimplement stuff, though. For it to be, you'd have to argue that the leftpad author was unusually sloppy. That may be true in this specific case, but in general, I'm not persuaded that the average OSS author is worse than the average programmer overall. IMHO, contributing your work to an OSS ecosystem is already a mild signal of competence.

On the wider topic of reimplementation: Recently there was an article here about how the latest Ubuntu includes a bunch of coreutils binaries that have been rewritten in Rust. It turns out that, while this presumably reduced the number of memory corruption bugs (there was still one, somehow; I didn't dig into it), it introduced a bunch of new vulnerabilities, mostly caused by creating race conditions between checking a filesystem path and using the path for something.

Do you have a specific library in mind? I think it would have to be an ancient, unmaintained C library.

But I think most OSS code isn't like this -- even C code born long ago, if it's still in wide use, has been hardened by now. Examples: Linux kernel, GNU userland, PostgreSQL, Python.

>As an example, he put up a slide listing the 47 car brands that use curl in their products; he followed it with a slide listing the brands that contribute to curl. The second slide, needless to say, was empty.

>He emphasized that he has released curl under a free license, so there is no legal problem with what these companies are doing. But, he suggested, these companies might want to think a bit more about the future of the software they depend on.

There is little reason for minimal-restriction licenses to exist other than to allow corporate use without compensation or contribution. I would think by now that any hope that they would voluntarily be any less exploitative than they can would have been dashed.

If you aren't getting paid or working purely for your own benefit, use a protective license. Though, if thinly veiled license violation via LLM is allowed to stand, this won't be enough.

How so? We have open source operating systems running on a whole sleuth of systems ages apart. Interesting ideas and open collaboration coming out of the OS world.

This opposed to closed off “products” that change at the whims of the company owning it.

That's more of a historical artifact. The BSDs started as a set of patches for AT&T Unix that were _distributed_ by Berkeley. Eventually they became an entire operating system. _Then_ the various BSDs that we know today (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD) all forked and became completely independent operating systems. For decades, FreeBSD's kernel and userland has been developed independently from the OpenBSD kernel and userland which is developed independently from NetBSD's kernel and userland, etc. You could not take an OpenBSD program and run it on FreeBSD. Even recompilation from source isn't necessarily enough since the BSDs support different syscalls.

They are completely independent operating systems with a distant shared history.

Whereas on Linux, the distros are taking a common Linux kernel source, and combining it with their choice of common userlands like GNU. Debian has the same kernel and GNU userland that Arch and Fedora use. That is how Linux distros are "distros" whereas the BSDs are independent operating systems.

Distribution. But it’s not a Linux distribution.

The fact that the kernel security team has decided coordinating disclosure is someone else's problem so it happens inconsistently.

Also hilarious to see Drew Houston responding a bit later on the same thread:

> we're in a similar space -- http://www.getdropbox.com (and part of the yc summer 07 program) basically, sync and backup done right (but for windows and os x). i had the same frustrations as you with existing solutions.

> let me know if it's something you're interested in, or if you want to chat about it sometime.

>drew (at getdropbox.com)

It may well have been your point, but that it's the exact same person makes this even better

Define "so easily"?

Distribution. Which is a different word than distro, with a different meaning. Like smart and smartass.

The key words there are "when they're actually coordinated". Debian doesn't own the Linux kernel, and the kernel developers don't bother with coordinated disclosure, so the happy path of coordinated disclosure only happens when reporters make the non-obvious choice of reporting vulnerabilities to people other than the maintainers.

Presumably:

* https://github.com/V4bel/dirtyfrag/blob/master/assets/write-...

* https://github.com/V4bel/dirtyfrag/blob/master/assets/write-...

nixos comes to mind, rootless runpod, qubesos.

but they all have something in common, the issue is that your user is compromised that means the applications running in that user are compromised the only thing you gain is that you can trust your system, you can trust that your system is not compromised which is only relevant with infrastructure since if your user is compromised you're already fucked, multi-user setups with untrusted accounts are inheritly insecure and in infrastrucure the blast radius might be thousands of users that use the said service.

the breakdown looks something like this:

  - you heavily compromise a single user <- exploit not relevant
  - you compromise a shared setup via a bad user to compromise a lot of users <- should never be used anymore, namespace isolation is the replacement
  - you somewhat compromise a lot of users via infra compromise <- where this hurts

I think we've concluded already that user isolation is not safe and shouldn't be trusted, that's why we've invested to hard into namespacing(containers). users should only have what they need if you really care about security and don't want to tolerate the overhead of virtualization based security.

Would you mind sharing the relevant config?

Do you install system-wide software at all? How do you configure it?

That's my main reason to use "sudo" on the desktop.

I suppose I could install every piece of software locally, either from source or via flatpak, but this is a lot of work and much harder than doing it the easy way and using global install via my distro. Plus, non-distro installs are much more likely to be out of date and contain vulnerabilities of their own.

Yes, you are very special and smart. Good for you!

Most people however aren't and will happily run sudo after an npm postinstall script tells them to apt-install turboencabulator for their new frontend framework to function.

you have your supply chain risk still, it's just frozen as of 2009 and whatever you vendored back then is as of today swiss cheese; also you'd better have the compiler suite vendored, too (as you should with this strategy).

there's nothing stopping you from using python from 2009 except why would you want to do that to yourself - but the same strategy applies. the reference python implementation is written in C, after all.

This argument goes even further. If you have only 3 settings, why does it need to be an xml file?

> even C code born long ago, if it's still in wide use, has been hardened by now. Examples: Linux kernel

There have been two LPE vulnerability and exploits in the Linux kernel announced today. After the one announced just last week. I don't think as much of the C code born long ago has been as carefully hardened as you think.

(Copy Fail 2 and Dirty Frag today, and Copy Fail last week)

Statistically. Most of it is created to serve marketing, personal or other agenda needs and is sponsored through the corresponding means for it.

There’s a lot of misconception about how the open source comes to be and very small part, still significant of course, of it was really created for the benefit of a community. There are exceptions, but dig the organisational culture and origins and you’ll see the pattern. Also, thousands of projects are made for the satisfaction of the author himself being highly intelligent and high on algorithmic dopamine.

There is a lot of opposition in the FOSS community for restrictive/protective licenses. And to be fair, this comes from a consistent and entirely logical worldview.

There's a bunch of problems with getting companies to pay for this, too - that sense of entitlement (or even contractual obligation), the ability to control the project with cash, etc.

I don't have any answers or solutions. But I don't think we can hand-wave the problem away.

They exploited a linear stack buffer overflow. Not a write-what-where or arb write. A linear stack buffer overflow in 2026! There are at least two distinct failures there:

1. No strong stack protectors.

2. No kASLR.

That's 20-year-old exploit methodology.

Fair enough; yeah, at the point where the embargo failed, it was important that patches get to distros as fast as possible in order to ship the fixes.

While you’re correct that FreeBSD is not a Linux distribution, the word “distro” is literally short for distribution. It doesn’t have a different meaning like smart and smartass, it’s more like repo and repository.

You really can't protect against a malicious sysadmin. Let them be bitten, maybe they will be smarter next time.

One. "Copy Fail 2" and "Dirty Frag" are the same thing.

Sure, I didn't mean to say that these examples are guaranteed 100% safe -- just that I trust them to be enormously more safe than software that accomplishes the same task that was hand-written by either a human or an an LLM last week.

ETA: I'm not saying it has to, I'm saying it's possible to imagine reasons that would justify this decision in some cases.

Because it might grow in future and you want to allow flexibility for that, because it might be the input to or output from some external system that requires XML, because your team might have standardised on always using XML config files, because introducing yet another custom plain text file format just creates unnecessary cognitive load for everyone who has to use it are real-world reasons I can think of.

But really I was just looking for a concrete example where I know the complexity of the implementation has definitely caused vulnerabilities, whether or not the choice to use it to solve the problem at hand was sensible. I have zero love for XML.

The problem is that they get away too easily with bugs in their products they ship to customers. If this would come with some penalties, there would be some incentive to invest in security and this would probably often flow back to upstream projects.

And consideing the size of the kenel, I call this stupendously good.

You (anyone, not you personally) write that much code yourself and let's see how well you did in comparison.

Like a money-back guarantee?

Like you get when you buy e.g. MS products?

/s

I am not talking about the open-source projects, but the downstream products such as cars that integrate curl.