>> high-impact npm accounts are now put into a read-only mode for 72 hours when they change their email or use a 2FA recovery code. This delay allows maintainers time to respond and recover the account before their account can be used to start an attack.
That's the usual runaway problem, right? Why not 60 then? People go on sabbaticals! etc etc.
I feel like the only way to be wrong for this class of problem is to believe that there's a singular right answer. Just pick something reasonable (like how weekends are a fairly common thing, so don't make it shorter than 48 hours). Start there, then see how much of an issue persists. No matter what, at scale you'll find someone complaining that the number is too little, and people complaining that it's too much. Eventually you just have to tell the complainers to deal with it.
There is a big difference between 3 days when someone may be sick or traveling and not looking and 30 which aligns better with 99% of scenarios this may be an issue with. 3 days is absurd. Even password apps with kill switches will default to 7 days.
Cyber attacks will frequently happen on a Friday just for this scenario, they anticipate no ones looking over the weekend.
And 365 days probably aligns with 100% of scenarios. It doesn't mean it's a good idea, because the longer the delay is the more downsides you also get.
Blocking a maintainer from pushing updates for a full month after changing their e-mail would be obviously absurd. So Github would have to add a way of enabling maintainers to super-uper-duper confirm the change and cut the delay short. Which is likely not currently possible, hence starting with a shorter delay.
It's often not the maintainer that removes a poisoned release, it's the npm security team/tools. So unless the whole team takes a month off, we're all safe.
It sounds like we should plot 'count of compromised repos' against 'time taken for maintainer to initiate a resolution', and pick something just after the inflection point.
I paid $8 for the recently expired email domain of the sole author of NPM package "foreach", so then control to ship any code I wanted to 70k companies was just a support ticket or password reset away. 72 hours would not make a difference here.
Talked to NPM about this when it went viral, and once again all they could say was enabling package signing, even optionally, would discourage inexperienced people from contributing packages as they would be pressured to learn basic security and key management.
Sorry, if you are unwilling to take 10 minutes to learn how to sign your code, you have no business maintaining software releases millions of people depend on. Full stop.
But NPM will not even make it -optional- and rejects all PRs to implement this going back a decade. So no one feels pressured into basic security. Cool.
My only use of GitHub Actions specifies permissions that only allow it to write to the issue tracker, so if the program it executes (which is the "gh" program) is malicious then the only damage it can cause is to the issue tracker and not to the repository itself (unless GitHub Actions itself is compromised). Furthermore, there are no private files (I do not host private files on remote services such as GitHub), so they can't steal my files either.
I think one thing that would help is to support mutual TLS, with X.509 certificate chains for authentication. This is more secure than personal access tokens and allows you to issue them to yourself and others without needing to login first, including to specify whatever permissions you want to set (as a subset of the permissions of the issuer) and to make them expire. (You could also store the private keys of one certificate on a separate computer not connected to the internet, and use that to issue another one to yourself to use that one instead, and can use a passworded private key as well (an alternative of 2FA), so you can recover even if your certificate you are using does become compromised, or something deletes it (intentionally or not), and can revoke the ones that are compromised.)
Mutual TLS (and even ordinary TLS) won't solve everything, but in combination with other things, including ability to restrict access to what is needed, and avoiding needing too many dependencies (since, programs that need too many dependencies is also one thing that can cause many problems), and many other things, it can be an additional step to help with security.
Github owns NPM. Github has unprecedented access to code analysis tools. Github can run static analysis on nearly everything. Introducing a cooldown period seems like the lowest tech solution to a technological problem I have seen in a longwhile.
Cooldowns have the benefit of being straightforward. It doesn't rely on updating rules, scanning, keeping up with obfuscation techniques, etc. It just stops installs for a period of time after publish.
I think that cooldowns are mostly dumb but they're very cheap to deploy and they do give other approaches (like scanners) more time to adapt/ do their job.
In my opinion, things like scanners should not need to exist if npm's parent company, GitHub, were to take responsibility for what was published to npm. If Walmart sells you an item that ends up being a handgrenade there would be hell to pay. In this example, Walmart cannot simply say that Walmart is not in charge of what goes into the item and therefore "buyer beware." Yet, this is precisely what GitHub does with every npm package.
One reasonable approach is to increase the scrutiny for new releases based on how many active downloads of the package there are. So for new packages, maybe there will be not a ton of scrutiny, but for things that are downloaded by millions of users, like Axios, there would be significantly more scrutiny per release.
The epidemic of "not my job" and "[we] don't get paid to do that" is a large contributor to why the world is so messed up. I don't know what to call this phenomenon. In the Hawaiian language there is a word Kuleana which means "sacred responsibility" or "sacred task." If more people took on their Kuleana joyfully we would be inviting the ideal [realm] more rapidly.
Walmart and Github are so different. Walmart doesn't let anyone come in and set up a booth to sell things, Github does. Thinking that Github should take responsibility for what's hosted on it is... well, radical, to say the least.
What you're suggesting is a radical departure from how free software has been distributed historically. That goes well beyond Github and NPM.
Keys can be reused from anywhere. Trusted publishing means the attacker must trigger the specific workflow on GitHub, which is more difficult and leaves trace of actions on GitHub itself.
Trusted staged publishing helps a lot: you have to independently pwn the workflow _and_ then complete a separate 2FA flow as a maintainer. The workflow never sees any keys that can publish independently.
Trusted Publishing pins the publish to the workflow. The next step is to isolate "run untrusted code (`npm build`)" from "publish" in your workflows. Now you have two properties - the publish can only happen from one place and the publish is isolated from untrusted code execution.
I literally am reading this after setting GitHub actions five minutes ago to generate the APK version of my cross platform project for the first time. Great :\
It is fascinating how far people will go to do anything else at all other than having authors cryptographically sign their packages like every Linux package manager that matters since 1996.
Linux package managers like debian/apt also ship hundreds of signed NPM packages. In other words the unpaid Linux community has once again solved a problem Microsoft fundamentally failed to. Some things never change.
>> high-impact npm accounts are now put into a read-only mode for 72 hours when they change their email or use a 2FA recovery code. This delay allows maintainers time to respond and recover the account before their account can be used to start an attack.
'what time shall we put here?'
'what's the longest hangover you ever had?'
'let's put 72 hours'
A weekend plus a day to deal with things seems like a decent minimum duration when it’s somewhat arbitrary what the right number is.
I don't think so at all. People go on vacation all the time. This should be 30 days not 3.
That's the usual runaway problem, right? Why not 60 then? People go on sabbaticals! etc etc.
I feel like the only way to be wrong for this class of problem is to believe that there's a singular right answer. Just pick something reasonable (like how weekends are a fairly common thing, so don't make it shorter than 48 hours). Start there, then see how much of an issue persists. No matter what, at scale you'll find someone complaining that the number is too little, and people complaining that it's too much. Eventually you just have to tell the complainers to deal with it.
There is a big difference between 3 days when someone may be sick or traveling and not looking and 30 which aligns better with 99% of scenarios this may be an issue with. 3 days is absurd. Even password apps with kill switches will default to 7 days.
Cyber attacks will frequently happen on a Friday just for this scenario, they anticipate no ones looking over the weekend.
And 365 days probably aligns with 100% of scenarios. It doesn't mean it's a good idea, because the longer the delay is the more downsides you also get.
Blocking a maintainer from pushing updates for a full month after changing their e-mail would be obviously absurd. So Github would have to add a way of enabling maintainers to super-uper-duper confirm the change and cut the delay short. Which is likely not currently possible, hence starting with a shorter delay.
It's often not the maintainer that removes a poisoned release, it's the npm security team/tools. So unless the whole team takes a month off, we're all safe.
It sounds like we should plot 'count of compromised repos' against 'time taken for maintainer to initiate a resolution', and pick something just after the inflection point.
I paid $8 for the recently expired email domain of the sole author of NPM package "foreach", so then control to ship any code I wanted to 70k companies was just a support ticket or password reset away. 72 hours would not make a difference here.
Talked to NPM about this when it went viral, and once again all they could say was enabling package signing, even optionally, would discourage inexperienced people from contributing packages as they would be pressured to learn basic security and key management.
Sorry, if you are unwilling to take 10 minutes to learn how to sign your code, you have no business maintaining software releases millions of people depend on. Full stop.
But NPM will not even make it -optional- and rejects all PRs to implement this going back a decade. So no one feels pressured into basic security. Cool.
My only use of GitHub Actions specifies permissions that only allow it to write to the issue tracker, so if the program it executes (which is the "gh" program) is malicious then the only damage it can cause is to the issue tracker and not to the repository itself (unless GitHub Actions itself is compromised). Furthermore, there are no private files (I do not host private files on remote services such as GitHub), so they can't steal my files either.
I think one thing that would help is to support mutual TLS, with X.509 certificate chains for authentication. This is more secure than personal access tokens and allows you to issue them to yourself and others without needing to login first, including to specify whatever permissions you want to set (as a subset of the permissions of the issuer) and to make them expire. (You could also store the private keys of one certificate on a separate computer not connected to the internet, and use that to issue another one to yourself to use that one instead, and can use a passworded private key as well (an alternative of 2FA), so you can recover even if your certificate you are using does become compromised, or something deletes it (intentionally or not), and can revoke the ones that are compromised.)
Mutual TLS (and even ordinary TLS) won't solve everything, but in combination with other things, including ability to restrict access to what is needed, and avoiding needing too many dependencies (since, programs that need too many dependencies is also one thing that can cause many problems), and many other things, it can be an additional step to help with security.
Github owns NPM. Github has unprecedented access to code analysis tools. Github can run static analysis on nearly everything. Introducing a cooldown period seems like the lowest tech solution to a technological problem I have seen in a longwhile.
Cooldowns have the benefit of being straightforward. It doesn't rely on updating rules, scanning, keeping up with obfuscation techniques, etc. It just stops installs for a period of time after publish.
I think that cooldowns are mostly dumb but they're very cheap to deploy and they do give other approaches (like scanners) more time to adapt/ do their job.
In my opinion, things like scanners should not need to exist if npm's parent company, GitHub, were to take responsibility for what was published to npm. If Walmart sells you an item that ends up being a handgrenade there would be hell to pay. In this example, Walmart cannot simply say that Walmart is not in charge of what goes into the item and therefore "buyer beware." Yet, this is precisely what GitHub does with every npm package.
One reasonable approach is to increase the scrutiny for new releases based on how many active downloads of the package there are. So for new packages, maybe there will be not a ton of scrutiny, but for things that are downloaded by millions of users, like Axios, there would be significantly more scrutiny per release.
The epidemic of "not my job" and "[we] don't get paid to do that" is a large contributor to why the world is so messed up. I don't know what to call this phenomenon. In the Hawaiian language there is a word Kuleana which means "sacred responsibility" or "sacred task." If more people took on their Kuleana joyfully we would be inviting the ideal [realm] more rapidly.
Walmart and Github are so different. Walmart doesn't let anyone come in and set up a booth to sell things, Github does. Thinking that Github should take responsibility for what's hosted on it is... well, radical, to say the least.
What you're suggesting is a radical departure from how free software has been distributed historically. That goes well beyond Github and NPM.
It's certainly the lowest tech piece of their announcements over the last day, as far as I can tell.
https://github.blog/changelog/2026-07-28-npm-publish-time-ma...
That is because Github is not a thing anymore. We are talking about Microsoft.
One thing I don't quite get is how trusted publishing is supposed to be more secure. It still allows publishing if they pwn your workflow.
Is it purely more secure because they can't exfiltrate your secret keys to publish again?
I feel like if your workflow gets pwned you'd be rotating your keys anyways, so I'm not sure if the vendor lock-in is worth it.
Keys can be reused from anywhere. Trusted publishing means the attacker must trigger the specific workflow on GitHub, which is more difficult and leaves trace of actions on GitHub itself.
Trusted staged publishing helps a lot: you have to independently pwn the workflow _and_ then complete a separate 2FA flow as a maintainer. The workflow never sees any keys that can publish independently.
Trusted Publishing pins the publish to the workflow. The next step is to isolate "run untrusted code (`npm build`)" from "publish" in your workflows. Now you have two properties - the publish can only happen from one place and the publish is isolated from untrusted code execution.
I literally am reading this after setting GitHub actions five minutes ago to generate the APK version of my cross platform project for the first time. Great :\
It is fascinating how far people will go to do anything else at all other than having authors cryptographically sign their packages like every Linux package manager that matters since 1996.
Linux package managers like debian/apt also ship hundreds of signed NPM packages. In other words the unpaid Linux community has once again solved a problem Microsoft fundamentally failed to. Some things never change.
Hey Siri, what is a local repo?
Been quietly thinking this for years
the bare minimum award, for the only language and only registry where this regularly happens.
At this rate I'm going to have "npm is by far the worst thing about NodeJS" printed on my gravestone.