Anyone know of a better way to protect yourself than setting a min release age on npm/pnpm/yarn/bun/uv (and anything else that supports it)?
Setting min-release-age=7 in .npmrc (needs npm 11.10+) would have protected the 334 unlucky people who downloaded the malicious @bitwarden/cli 2026.4.0, published ~19+ hours ago (see https://www.npmjs.com/package/@bitwarden/cli?activeTab=versi... and select "show deprecated versions").
Same story for the malicious axios (@1.14.1 and @0.30.4, removed within ~3h), ua-parser-js (hours), and node-ipc (days). Wouldn't have helped with event-stream (sat for 2+ months), but you can't win them all.
~/.npmrc
min-release-age=7 # days
~/Library/Preferences/pnpm/rc
minimum-release-age=10080 # minutes
~/.bunfig.toml
[install]
minimumReleaseAge = 604800 # seconds
# not related to npm, but while at it...
~/.config/uv/uv.toml
exclude-newer = "7 days"
p.s. shameless plug: I was looking for a simple tool that will check your settings / apply a fix, and was surprised I couldn't find one, I released something (open source, free, MIT yada yada) since sometimes one click fix convenience increases the chances people will actually use it. https://depsguard.com if anyone is interested.
I like the idea of a cool down. But my next question is would this have been caught if no one updated? I know in practice not everyone would be on a cool down. But presumably this comprise was only found out because a lot of people did update.
> presumably this comprise was only found out because a lot of people did update
This was supposedly discovered by "Socket researchers", and the product they're selling is proactive scanning to detect/block malicious packages, so I'd assume this would've been discovered even if no regular users had updated.
But I'd claim even for malware that's only discovered due to normal users updating, it'd generally be better to reduce the number of people affected with a slow roll-out (which should happen somewhat naturally if everyone sets, or doesn't set, their cool-down based on their own risk tolerance/threat model) rather than everyone jumping onto the malicious package at once and having way more people compromised than was necessary for discovery of the malware.
Cooldown sounds like a good idea ONLY IF these so called security companies can catch these malicious dependencies during the cooldown period. Are they doing this bit or individual researchers find a malware and these companies make headlines?
For researchers who notice new releases as soon as they are published and discover malice based on that alone, I agree, and every step of that can be automated to some level of effectiveness.
But for researchers who aren't sufficiently effective until the first victim starts shouting that something went sideways, the malicious actor would be wise to simply ensure no victim is aware until well after the cooldown period, implementing novel obfuscation that evades static analysis and the like.
That assumes discovering a security bug is random and it could happen to anyone, so more shots on goal is better. But is that a good way to model it?
Ir seems like if you were at all likely to be giving dependencies the extra scrutiny that discovers a problem, you’d probably know it? Most of the people who upgraded didn’t help, they just got owned.
A cooldown gives anyone who does investigate more time to do their work.
It's a trade off for sure, maybe if companies could have "honeypot" environments where they update everything and deploy their code, and try to monitor for sneaky things.
If I were in charge of a package manager I would be seriously looking into automated and semi automated exploit detection so that people didn't have to yolo new packages to find out if they are bad. The checking would itself become an attack vector, but you could mitigate that too. I'm just saying _something_ is possible.
They are not, but npm is uniquely bad in that regard. Refusal to implement security features that would have made attacks like this harder really doesn't help https://github.com/node-forward/discussions/issues/29
The lack of a comprehensive standard library for JavaScript also results in projects pulling many more third party dependencies than you would with most other modern environments. It’s just a bigger attack surface. And if you can compromise a module used for basic functionality that you’d get out of the box elsewhere, the blast radius will be enormous.
Not to mention a culture of basically one-line packages ad infinitum. I downloaded a JS tool the other day to generate test reports and it had around 300 dependencies.
Needless to say I’m running all my JS tools in a Docker container these days.
So why hasn’t someone created a batteries include JS library? I don’t program in JS on the backend so I don’t know how feasible something like that is.
https://github.com/stdlib-js/stdlib was is one of several attempts at that, but yes the issue is that different people have very different views of what should be standard.
> Anyone know of a better way to protect yourself than setting a min release age on npm/pnpm/yarn/bun/uv (and anything else that supports it)?
Most of these attacks don't make it into the upstream source, so solutions[1] that build from source get you ~98% of the way there. If you can't get a from-source build vs. pulling directly from the registries, can reduce risk somewhat with a cooldown period.
For the long tail of stuff that makes it into GitHub, you need to do some combination of heuristics on the commits/maintainers and AI-driven analysis of the code change itself. Typically run that and then flag for human review.
> Anyone know of a better way to protect yourself than setting a min release age on npm/pnpm/yarn/bun/uv (and anything else that supports it)?
With pnpm, you can also use trustPolicy: no-downgrade, which prevents installing packages whose trust level has decreased since older releases (e.g. if a release was published with the npm cli after a previous release was published with the github OIDC flow).
Another one is to not run post-install scripts (which is the default with pnpm and configurable with npm).
These would catch most of the compromised packages, as most of them are published outside of the normal release workflow with stolen credentials, and are run from post-install scripts
Stop using Javascript. Or Typescript or whatever excuses they have for the fundamentally flawed language that should have been retired eons ago instead of trying to get it fixed. Javascript, its ecosystem has always been a pack of cards. Time and again it has been proven again. I think this is like the 3rd big attack in the last 30 days alone.
Yes but it has nothing to do with the language, and everything to do with the ecosystem (npm tried to make thing such as mandatory MFA etc, npmjs is so big maintainers pushed back)
TypeScript on its own is a great language, with a very interesting type system. Most other type systems can’t run doom.
Cooldowns are passing the buck. These are all caught with security scanning tools, and AI is probably going to be better at this than people going forward, so just turn on the cooldowns server-side. Package updates go into a "quarantine" queue until they are scanned. Only after scanning do they go live.
"Just" is doing a lot of work; most ecosystems are not set up or equipped to do this kind of server-side queuing in 2026. That's not to say that we shouldn't do this, but nobody has committed the value (in monetary and engineering terms) to realizing it. Perhaps someone should.
By contrast, a client-side cooldown doesn't require very much ecosystem or index coordination.
This kind of thinking is why I don't trust the security of open source software. Industry standard security practices don't get implemented because no one is being paid to actually care and they are disconnected from the users due to not making income from them.
I think the rest of your analysis is correct! I'm only pushing back on perceptions that we can get there trivially; I think people often (for understandable reasons) discount the social and technical problems that actually dominate modernization efforts in open source packaging.
The approach you outline is totally compatible with an additional one or two day time gate for the artifact mirrors that back prod builds. Deploy in locked-down non-prod environments with strong monitoring after the scans pass, wait a few days for prod, and publicly report whatever you find, and you're now "doing your part" in real-time while still accounting for the fallibility of your automated tools.
There's risk there of a monoculture categorically missing some threats if everyone is using the same scanners. But I still think that approach is basically pro-social even if it involves a "cooldown".
I agree, even without project glasswing (that Microsoft is part of) even with cheaper models, and Microsoft's compute (Azure, OpenAI collaboration), it makes no sense that private companies needs to scan new package releases and find malware before npm does. I'm sure they have some reason for it (people rely on packages to be immediately available on npm, and the real use case of patching a zero day CVE quickly), but until this is fixed fundamentally, I'd say the default should be a cooldown (either serverside or not) and you'll need to opt in to get the current behavior. This might takes years of deprecation though, I'm sure it was turned on now, a lot of things would break. (e.g. every CVE public disclosure will also have to wait that additional cooldown... and if Anthropic are not lying, we are bound for a tsunami of patched CVEs soon...)
There are so many ways to self-host package repos that "immediate availability" to the wider npm-using public is a non-issue.
Exceptions to quarantine rules just invites attackers to mark malicious updates as security patches.
If every kind of breakage, including security bugs, results in a 2-3 hour wait to ship the fix, maybe that would teach folks to be more careful with their release process. Public software releases really should not be a thing to automate away; there needs to be a human pushing the button, ideally attested with a hardware security key.
Isn’t the problem with a minimum age release that the opposite would also occur - a high priority fix of zero day under exploit wouldn’t be fixed and you could be compromised in the window?
It is! It’s a tough problem to balance. The good news is that you can always override for specific cases. Linking to my other reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47880149
Regarding doing more than just a minimum release age: The tool I personally use is Aikido "safe-chain". It sets minimum release age, but also provides a wrapper for npm/uv/etc where upon trying to install anything it first checks each dependency for known or suspected vulnerabilities against an online commercial vulnerability database.
compartmentalize. I do development and anything finance / crypto related / sensitive on separate machines.
If you're brave you can run whonix.
The issue is developers who have publish access to popular packages - they really should be publishing and signing on a separate machine / environment.
Same with not doing any personal work on corporate machines (and having strict corp policy - vercel were weak here).
I use a separate dev user account (on macOS) for package installations, VSCode extensions, coding agents and various other developer activities.
I know it's far from watertight (and it's useless if you're working with bitwarden itself), but I hope it blocks the low hanging fruit sort of attacks.
Check your home folder permissions on macos, last time I checked mine were world readable (until I changed them). I was very surprised by it, and only noticed when adding an new user account for my wife.
I noticed that too (and changed it). The home folder appears to be world readable because otherwise sharing via the Public folder wouldn't work. The folders where the actual data lives are not world readable.
I think this is a bad idea, because it means the permissions of any new folders have to be closely guarded, which is easy to forget.
But how do you know which one is good? If foo package sends out an announcement that v1.4.3 was hacked, upgrade now to v1.4.4 and you're on v1.4.3, waiting a week seems like a bad idea. But if the hackers are the one sending the announcement, then you'd really want to wait the week!
Install tools using a package manager that performs builds as an unprivileged user account other than your own, sandboxes builds in a way that restricts network and filesystem access, and doesn't run let packages run arbitrary pre/post-install hooks by default.
Avoid software that tries to manage its own native (external, outside the language ecosystem) dependencies or otherwise needs pre/post-install hooks to build.
If you do packaging work, try to build packages from source code fetched directly from source control rather than relying on release tarballs or other published release artifacts. These attacks are often more effective at hiding in release tarballs, NPM releases, Docker images, etc., than they are at hiding in Git history.
Learn how your tools actually build. Build your own containers.
Learn how your tools actually run. Write your own CI templates.
My team at work doesn't have super extreme or perfect security practices, but we try to be reasonably responsible. Just doing the things I outlined above has spared me from multiple supply chain attacks against tools that I use in the past few weeks.
Platform, DevEx, and AppSec teams are all positioned well to help with stuff like this so that it doesn't all fall on individual developers. They can:
- write and distribute CI templates
- run caches, proxies, and artifact repositories which might create room to
- pull through packages on a delay
- run automated scans on updates and flag packages for risks?
- maybe block other package sources to help prevent devs from shooting themselves in the foot with misconfiguration
- set up shared infrastructure for CI runners that
- use such caches/repos/proxies by default
- sandbox the network for build$
- help replace or containerize or sandbox builds that currently only run on bare metal on some aging Jenkins box on bare metal
- provide docs
- on build sandboxing tools/standards/guidelines
- on build guidelines surrounding build tools and their behaviours (e.g., npm ci vs npm install, package version locking and pinning standards)
- promote packaging tools for development environments and artifact builds, e.g.,
- promote deterministic tools like Nix
- run build servers that push to internal artifact caches to address trust assumptions in community software distributions
- figure out when/whether/how to delegate to vendors who do these things
I think there's a lot of things to do here. The hardest parts are probably organizational and social; coordination is hard and network effects are strong. But I also think that there are some basics that help a lot. And developers who serve other developers, whether they are formally security professionals or not, are generally well-positioned to make it easier to do the right thing than the sloppy thing over time.
The hypothesis you're referring to is something like "if everyone uses a 7-day cooldown, then the malware just doesn't get discovered for 7 days?", right?
An alternative hypothesis: what if 7-day cooldowns incentivize security scanners, researchers, and downstream packagers to race to uncover problems within an 7-day window after each release?
Without some actual evidence, I'm not sure which of these is correct, but I'm pretty sure it's not productive to state either one of these as an accepted fact.
Well, luckily, those who find the malicious activity are usually companies who do this proactively (for the good of the community, and understandably also for marketing). There are several who seem to be trying to be the first to announce, and usually succeed. IMHO it should be Microsoft (as owners of GitHub, owners of npm) who should take the helm and spend the tokens to scan each new package for malicious code. It gets easier and easier to detect as models improve (also gets easier and easier to create, and try to avoid detection on the other hand)
That was my first instinct as well but I'm not sure how true it really is.
Many companies exist now whose main product is supply chain vetting and scanning (this article is from one such company). They are usually the ones writing up and sharing articles like this - so the community would more than likely hear about it even if nobody was actually using the package yet.
> This plan works by letting software supply chain companies find security issues in new releases. Many security companies have automated scanners for popular and less popular libraries, with manual triggers for those libraries which are not in the top N.
https://github.com/doy/rbw is a Rust alternative to the Bitwarden CLI. Although the Rust ecosystem is moving in NPM's direction (very large and very deep dependency trees), you still need to trust far fewer authors in your dependency tree than what is common for Javascript.
326 packages right now when doing a build. Seems large in general, but for a Rust project, not abnormal.
Takes what, maybe 15 seconds to compile on a high-core machine from scratch? Isn't the end of the world.
Worse is the scope to have to review all those things, if you'd like to use it for your main passwords, that'd be my biggest worry. Luckily most are well established already as far as I can tell.
Why are you talking about compile times in a thread about supply chain security.
326 packages is approximately 326 more packages than I will ever fully audit to a point where my employer would be comfortable with me making that decision (I do it because many eyes make bugs shallow).
It's also approximately 300 more than the community will audit, because it will only be "the big ones" that get audited, like serde and tokio.
I don't see people rushing to audit `zmij` (v1.0.19), despite it having just as much potential to backdoor my systems as tokio does.
"326 seems large, but not abnormal" was the state of JS in the past as well.
Chance of someone auditing all of them is virtually zero, and in practice no one audits anything, so you are still effectively blindly trusting that none of those 326 got compromised.
It is baffling to me that a language that is as focused on safety/security as Rust decided to take the JavaScript approach to their ecosystem. I find it rather contradictory.
I doubt Microsoft's kernel/system Rust code is pulling in a lot of crates. The Linux kernel sure isn't, and Android's Bluetooth stack doesn't seem to either.
Using crates is a choice. You can write fully independent C++ or you can pull in Boost + Qt + whatever libraries you need. Even for C programs, I find my package manager downloading tons of dependencies for some programs, including things like full XML parsers to support a feature I never plan to use.
Javascript was one of the first languages to highlight this problem with things like left-pad, but the xz backdoor showed that it's also perfectly possible to do the same attack on highly-audited programs written in a system language that doesn't even have a package manager.
That's because you're mixing things. "Rust the language" isn't the one starting new projects and add new dependencies that have hundreds of dependencies of their own, this is the doing of developers. The developers who built Rust with a focus on safety and security is not the same developers mentioned before.
Design decisions have predictable consequences. Large masses of people, who make up an ecosystem like the that of a programming language community, respond predictably to their environment. Each individual programmer has a choice, sure, but you can't just "individual responsibility" your way out of the predictable consequences of incentive structures.
That's true. But it does seem like a logic result of having no real standard library. That lone fact has kept me away from Rust for real projects, because I don't want to pull in a bunch of defacto-standard-but-not-officially dependencies for simple tasks. That's probably a large contributor to the current state of dependency bloat.
Yeah, it does require you to be meticulous about what you depend on. Personally I stick with libraries that don't use 100s of other crates, and tried and reviewed various libraries over the year, so you have your "toolkit" of libraries you know are well built and you know how they work internally.
Ultimately in any language you get the sort of experience you build for yourself with the environment you setup, it is possible in most languages to be more conservative and minimal even if the ecosystem at large is not, but it does require more care and time.
'no real standard library' doesn't seem entirely fair. Rust has a huge standard library. What it does have is the policy to only include "mature" things with little expected API evolution in the standard libary, which leaves gaping holes where a json parser, a http client or a logging library should be. Those are all those defacto-standard-but-not-officially dependencies
Cargo made its debut in 2014, a year before the infamous left-pad incident, and three years before the first large-scale malicious typosquatting attacks hit PyPI and NPM. The risks were not as well-understood then as they are today. And even today it is very far from being a solved problem.
Does this take into account feature flags when summing LOC? It's common practice in Rust to really only use a subset of a dependency, controlled by compile-time flags.
My experience has been that while there's significant granularity in terms of features, in practice very few people actively go out of their way to prune the default set because the ergonomics are kind of terrible, and whether or not the default feature set is practically empty or pulls in tons of stuff varies considerably. I felt strongly enough about this that I wrote up my only blog post on this a bit over a year ago, and I think most of it still applies: https://saghm.com/cargo-features-rust-compile-times/
For a given tool, I'd expect the Rust version to have even more deps than the JS version because code reuse is more important in a lower-level language. I get the argument that JS users are on average less competent than Rust users, but we're talking about authors who build serious tools/libs in the first place.
Frustratingly, they're not by default though; you need to explicitly use `--locked` (or `--frozen`, which is an alias for `--locked --offline`) to avoid implicit updates. I've seen multiple teams not realize this and get confused about CI failures from it.
The implicit update surface is somewhat limited by the fact that versions in Cargo.toml implicitly assume the `^` operator on versions that don't specify a different operator, so "1.2.3" means "1.2.x, where x >= 3". For reasons that have never been clear to me, people also seem to really like not putting the patch version in though and just putting stuff like "1.2", meaning that anything other than a major version bump will get pulled in.
> The implicit update surface is somewhat limited by the fact that versions in Cargo.toml implicitly assume the `^` operator on versions that don't specify a different operator, so "1.2.3" means "1.2.x, where x >= 3". For reasons that have never been clear to me, people also seem to really like not putting the patch version in though and just putting stuff like "1.2", meaning that anything other than a major version bump will get pulled in.
Not quite: "1.2.3" = "^1.2.3" = ">=1.2.3, <2.0.0" in Cargo [0], and "1.2" = "^1.2.0" = ">=1.2.0, <2.0.0", so you get the "1.x.x" behavior either way. If you actually want the "1.2.x" behavior (e.g., I've sometimes used that behavior for gmp-mpfr-sys), you should write "~1.2.3" = ">=1.2.3, <1.3.0".
I don't know how I got this wrong because I literally went and looked at that page to try to remind myself, but I somehow misread it, because you're definitely right. This probably isn't the first time I've gotten this wrong either.
From thinking it through more closely, it does actually seem like it might be a little safer to avoid specifying the patch version; it seems like putting 1.2.3 would fail to resolve any valid version in the case that 1.2.2 is the last non-yanked version and 1.2.3 is yanked. I feel like "1.2.3" meaning "~1.2.3" would have been a better default, since it at least provides some useful tradeoff compared to "1.2", but with the way it actually works, it seems like putting a full version with no operator is basically worse than either of the other options, which is disappointing.
I haven't heard anything about this, but I really wish it was there by default. I don't think the way it works right now fits anyone's expectations of what the lockfile is supposed to do; the whole point of storing the resolved versions in a file is to, well, lock them, and implicitly updating them every time you build doesn't do that.
Since you're here, and you happened to indirectly allude to something that seems to have become increasingly common in the Rust world nowadays, I can't help but be curious about your thoughts on libraries checking their lockfiles into version control. It's not totally clear to me exactly when or why it became widespread, but it used to be relatively rare for me to see in open source libraries in the first few post-1.0 years of Rust, whereas at this point I think it's more common for me to see than not.
Do you think it's an actively bad practice, completely benign, or something in between where it makes sense in some cases but probably should still be avoided in others? Offhand, the only variable I can think of that might influence a different choice is that maybe closed-source packages been reused within a company (especially if trying to interface with other package management systems, which I saw firsthand when working at AWS but I'm guessing is something other large companies would also run into), but I'm curious if there are other names nuances I haven't thought of
Sure, but according to semver it's also totally fine to change a function that returns a Result to start returning Err in cases that used to be Ok. Semver might be ae to project from your Rust code not compiling after you update, but it doesn't guarantee it will do the same thing the next time you run it. While changes like that could still happen in a patch release, I'd argue that you're losing nothing by forgoing new API features if all you're doing is recompiling the existing code you have without making any changes, so only getting patches and manually updating for anything else is a better default. (That said, one of the sibling comments pointed out I was actually wrong about the implicit behavior of Cargo dependencies, so what I recommended doesn't protect from anything, but not for the reasons it sounds like you were thinking).
Some people might argue that changing a function to return an error where it didn't previously would be a breaking change; I'd argue that those people are wrong about what semver means. From what I can tell, people having their own mental model of semver that conflicts with the actual specification is pretty common. Most of the time when I've had coworkers claim that semver says something that actively conflicts with what it says, after I point out the part of the spec that says something else, they end up still advocating for what they originally had said. This is fine, because there's nothing inherently wrong with a version schema other than semver, but I try to push back when the term itself gets used incorrectly because it makes discussions much more difficult than they need to be.
Does it support autofill for other apps on mobile? I'd argue that putting passwords in your phone clipboard could itself be risky (although for someone who's extremely security conscious, maybe discouraging using apps isn't a downside)
Yes, weirdly enough at the time there was no reply button, I thought HN comments had a maximum nested depth, but now it has a reply button and so does yours. Weird.
Ah, no worries! Replies seem to get throttled sometimes when the site detects a lot of nested replies quickly and it intentionally delays the ability to reply a bit. I've always assumed that it's intended as a way to try to mitigate threads that potentially are devolving into flamewars.
A few months ago I tried to build a .NET package on Linux, and the certificate revocation checks for the dependencies didn't complete even after several minutes. Eventually I found out about the option `NUGET_CERTIFICATE_REVOCATION_MODE=offline`, which managed to cause the build to complete in a sane amount of time.
It's hard for me to take seriously any suggestion that .NET is a model for how ecosystems should approach dependency management based on that, but I guess having an abysmal experience when there are dependencies is one way to avoid risks. (I would imagine it's probably not this bad on Windows, or else nobody would use it, but at least personally I have no interest in developing on a stack that I can't expect to work reliably out of the box Linux)
That’s my concern too. Rust has the same dependency concerns, which is how hackers get into code. VaultWarden has the same Rust dependency concern. Ironically we’re entering an age where C/C++ seems to have everything figured out from a dependency injection standpoint
The issue was a compromised build pipeline that shipped a poisoned package.
But PSA: If something is critical to the business and you’re using npm, pin your dependencies. I’ve had this debate with other devs throughout the years and they usually point to the lockfile as assurance, but version ranges with a ^ mean that when the lockfile gets updated, you can pull in newer versions you didn’t explicitly choose.
If what you're building can put your company out of business it's worth the hassle.
But it goes the other way too. If there's a security vulnerability that was fixed in a later version, you want the system to automatically pick that up and apply it for you in an ideal scenario.
At this point, the risk of a compromised package outweighs the risk of an upstream vuln that actually matters. Npm audit is full of junk like client side redos vulns, you could probably ignore 90%+ of the reports and still be secure against the majority of of-concern attack classes.
Security patches aren't like bugs or features where you can just roll a new version. Often patches need to be backported to older versions allowing software and libraries to be "upgraded" in place with no other change introduced.
Say you had software that controlled the careful mix of chemicals introduced into a municipal water supply. You just don't move from version 1.4 to 3.2, you fix 1.4 in place.
I had a really bad experience with the bitwarden cli. I believe it was `bw list` that I ran, assuming it would list the names of all my passwords, but too my surprise, it listed everything, including passwords and current totp codes. That's not the worst of it though. For some reason, when I ssh'ed into one of my servers and opened tmux, where I keep a weechat irc client running, I noticed that the entire content of the bw command was accessible from within the weechat text input field history. I have no idea how this happened, but it was quite terrifying. The issue persisted across tmux and weechat sessions, and only a reboot of the server would solve the problem.
I promptly removed the bw cli programme after that, and I definitely won't be installing it again.
Password managers are all about trust, the main link is about a compromise, so it's not surprising that the first comment is also about trust too, even if it's not directly about this particular compromise.
I found the default bwcli clunky and unacceptable, and it's why I don't use it, even though I still have a BitWarden subscription.
Where's the evidence that 1024kb's issue had anything to do with bw? How is that vaguely recalled anecdote a trust issue with bw? It was probably caused by accidentally copying something to the clipboard or some other buffer which was then transferred via ssh and imported into weechat, possibly with the help of custom terminal, ssh, tmux, or weechat settings making it too easy for data to be slung around like that.
I can't think of a plausible explanation for how bw is at fault for its terminal output ending up, across a ssh session and tmux invocation, in the chat history of weechat. Even if bw auto-copied its output to the clipboard (which as far as I could tell by glancing at the cli options, it doesn't and can't), and the clipboard is auto-copied to remote hosts, clipboard contents shouldn't appear in an irc client's history without explicit hacking to do that.
The claim is just noise, particularly because it doesn't seem to have ever been investigated.
It seems prudent, if someone wants to use a cli, to use rbw rather than bw, or even just pass or keypassxc-cli (and self-managed cloud backup or syncing). However, that's based on bw being a javascript mess, not based on the unlikely event of bw injecting its output through ssh into irc clients.
Not to mention utter nonsense. There’s no possible way that BW CLI somehow injected command history into a remote server. That was 100% something the GP did, a bug in their terminal, or a config they have with ssh/tmux, not Bitwarden.
that's our future... with AI. Engineers that don't know the difference between client-side convenience and server-side injection, how to configure `php.ini`, or that no synchronized password manager is safe. While the OAuth scope is `*`, and CORS is what you drink on the weekend.
Can someone explain why people struggle with CORS?
The full strength of the SOP applies by default. CORS is an insecurity feature that relaxes the SOP. Unless you need to relax the SOP, you shouldn't be enabling CORS, meaning you shouldn't be sending an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header at all.
If your front-end at www.example.com makes calls to api.example.com, then it's simple enough to just add www.example.com to CORS.
IME, CORS is pretty straightforward in prod but can be a huge pain in dev environments, so you end up with lots of little hacks to get your dev environments working (and then one of those hacks leaks back into prod and now you have CORS problems in prod).
This. This is a result of not having proper environments and engineering practices in place and so the team or engineer is free to just wing it and add hacks around security best practices because the Security Team (tm) is elsewhere and they never understand the ask. They know PKI and certificates, access card identity, maybe Cisco for their "cyber security" but that's usually where it ends. Yet somehow, they are in charge of CORS and TLS and Sast/Dast scans and everything else that should be baked into the pipelines and process. Resulting in an engineer saying f'it and adding an `if localhost` hack or something. CORS is one example but there are many others in pretty much every area of security. OAuth, CORS, LDAP, Secrets, Hashing, TOTP, you name it. Each has a plethora of packages and libraries that can "do" the thing but it always becomes a hairball mess to the dev because they never understood it to begin with.
That simple prod example isn't where people struggle with CORS. It's during development and I've got assets on Cloudflare and AWS and GCP and localhost:3000 and localhost:8000, and localhost:3001 and then a VM in Hetner at API.example.com because why not, that shit gets complicated and people get confused and lost. I mean, yeah, don't do that, but CORS gets complicated once the project gets enough teams involved.
I’ve found that the best way to deal with this is to add an entry to /etc/hosts for my local machine that fits the pattern for QA environment. Then I run a local reverse proxy with a self signed certificate.
Care to elaborate? I'd agree that the security/availability tradeoff is different, but "not safe" is as nonsensical a blanket statement as "all/only offline/paper-based/... password managers are safe".
There is a time and place for where it makes sense and a password manager CLI written in TypeScript importing hundreds of third-party packages is a direct red flag. It is a frequent occurrence.
We have seen it happen with Axios which is one of the biggest supply chain attacks on the Javascript / Typescript ecosystem and it makes no sense to build sensitive tools with that.
But how else are you going to check if a number is even or odd? Remember, the ONLY design goal is not repeating yourself (or in fact anything anyone has ever thought of implementing).
It's crazy because it's not default bw behavior, or even any bw behavior... I don't use the cli, but I don't see any built-in capacity to copy bw output to the clipboard. (In the UNIX way, you'd normally pipe it to a clipboard utility if you wanted it copied, and then the security consequences are on you.)
They probably caused it themselves, somehow, and then blamed bitwarden. Note in the original comment they aren't even entirely sure what the command was, and they weren't familiar with it or they wouldn't have been surprised by its output... so how can they be sure what else they did between that command and the weechat thing?
If the terminal or tmux fed terminal history into weechat, that's also not bw's problem.
Never used the CLI, but I do use their browser plugin. Would be quite a mess if that got compromised. What can I do to prevent it? Run old --tried and tested-- versions?
Quite bizarre to think much much of my well-being depends on those secrets staying secret.
Integration points increase the risk of compromise. For that reason, I never use the desktop browser extensions for my password manager. When password managers were starting to become popular there was one that had security issues with the browser integration so I decided to just avoid those entirely. On iOS, I'm more comfortable with the integration so I use it, but I'm wary of it.
I also find it far easier to resist accidentally entering credentials in a phishing site... I'm pretty good about checking, but it's something I tend to point out to family and friends to triple check if it doesn't auto suggest the right site.
I’m impressed with their feature to add the URL for next time, after manually filling on an unmatched URI. Hairs raised on neck clicking confirm though.
Importantly IMO is the extra phishing protection that the UX is really nice if and only if the url matches what's expected. If you end up on a fake url somehow, it's a nice speed bump that it doesn't let you auto-fill to make you think, hold on, something is wrong here.
If you're used to the clunkier workflow of copy-pasting from a separate app, then it's much easier to absent-mindedly repeat it for a not-quite-right url.
The 1Password mobile and desktop apps have such a nice UX that I’m happy copy pasting from and into it instead of having any of the browser extensions enabled.
I have 1Password configured to require password to unlock once per 24 hours. Rest of the time I have it running in the background or unlock it with TouchID (on the MacBook Pro) or FaceID (on the iPhone).
It also helps that I don’t really sign into a ton of services all the time. Mostly I log into HN, and GitHub, and a couple of others. A lot of my usage of 1Password is also centered around other kinds of passwords, like passwords that I use to protect some SSH keys, and passwords for the disk encryption of external hard drives, etc.
> The 1Password mobile and desktop apps have such a nice UX that I’m happy copy pasting from and into it instead of having any of the browser extensions enabled.
Also a great way of missing out on one of the best protections of password managers; completely eliminating phishing even without requiring thinking. And yes, still requires you to avoid manually copy-pasting without thinking when it doesn't work, but so much better than the current approach you're taking, which basically offers 0 protection against phishing.
My approach is that for critical sites like banking, I use the site URL stored in the password manager too, I don't navigate via any link clicking. I personally am fine with thinking when my entire net worth is potentially at stake.
It's not only about how you get there, but that the autofill shows/doesn't show, which is the true indicator (beyond the URL) if you're in the right place or not.
Rouge browser extensions for example could redirect you away from the bank website (if the bank website has poor security) when you go there, so even if you use the URL from the password manager, if you don't use the autofill feature, you can still get phished. And if the autofill doesn't show, and you mindlessly copy-paste, you'd still get phished. It's really the autofill that protects you here, not the URL in the password manager.
If you have rogue browser extensions installed, the browser extension can surely read the values that got filled into the login page without having to redirect to another site.
Not necessarily, a user could have accepted a permission request for some (legit) redirect extension that never asked for content permission, then when the rogue actor takes over, they want to compromise users and not change the already accepted permissions.
Concretely, I think for redirect browser extension users I'd use "webRequest" permission, while for in page access you'd need a content-script for specific pages, so in practice they differ in what the extension gets access to.
You don't need a autofill for a indicator. Simply bookmark your banks login page, even if it gets silently redirected later you will notice as the page wont be bookmarked anymore.
In Safari on iOS I have all the main pages I use as favourites, so that they show on the home screen of Safari.
Likewise I have links in the bookmarks bar on desktop.
I use these links to navigate to the main sites I use. And log in from there.
I don’t really need to think that way either.
But I agree that eliminating the possibility all-together is a nice benefit of using the browser integration, that I am missing out on by not using it.
Which works great until tags.tiqcdn.com, insuit.net or widget-mediator.zopim.com (example 3rd party domains loaded when you enter the landing page from some local banks) get compromised. I guess it's less likely to happen with the bigger banks, my main bank doesn't seem to load any scripts from 3rd party as an counter-example. Still, rouge browser extensions still scare me, although I only have like three installed.
> The problem is that the UX with a browser extension is so much better.
It's better, but calling it so much better [that it's unreasonable to forgo the browser extension] is a bit silly to me.
1. Go to website login page
2. trigger the global shortcut that will invoke your password manager
3. Your password manager will appear with the correct entry usually preselected, if not type 3 letters of the site's name.
4. Press enter to perform the auto type sequence.
There, an entire class of exploits entirely avoided. No more injecting third party JS in all pages. No more keeping an listening socket in your password manager, ready to give away all your secrets.
The tradeoff? You now have to manually press ctrl+shift+space or whatever instead when you need to log in.
The tradeoff is that you need to know how to setup a global shortcut or even know it's even possible. I wish people would stop minimizing the knowledge they have as something everyone just knows.
How do you set up this shortcut? I'd prefer to get rid of extensions, if for no better reason than sometimes it switches to my work profile and I have to re-login
On iOS I feel I have less control over what's running than on Linux (dont get me started on Windows or Android). So that's the order of how I dare to use it. But a supply chain attack: I'll always use a distributed program: the only thing I can do is only use old versions, and trusted distribution channels.
In theory the browser integration shouldn’t leak anything beyond the credentials being used, even if compromised.
When you use autofill, the native application will prompt to disclose credentials to the extension. At that point, only those credentials go over the wire. Others remain inaccessible to the extension.
We need cooldowns everywhere, by default. Development package managers, OS package managers, browser extensions. Even auto-updates in standalone apps should implement it. Give companies like Socket time to detect malicious updates. They're good at it, but it's pointless if everyone keeps downloading packages just minutes after they're published.
This would have protected the 334 people who downloaded @bitwarden/cli 2026.4.0 ~19h ago (according to https://www.npmjs.com/package/@bitwarden/cli?activeTab=versi...). Same for axios last month (removed in ~3h). Doesn't help with event-stream-style long-dormant attacks but those are rarer.
(plug: released a small CLI to auto-configure these — https://depsguard.com — I tried to find something that will help non developers quickly apply recommended settings, and couldn't find one)
These vulnerabilities are all caught by scanners and the packages are taken down 2-3 hours after going live. Nothing needs to take 7 days, that's just a recommendation. But maybe all packages should be scanned, which apparently only takes a couple of hours, before going live to users?
Shellshock was in 2014 and Log4Shell was 2021. It's far more likely that you're going to get pwned by using a too-recent unreviewed malicious package than to be unknowingly missing a security update that keeps you vulnerable to easy RCEs. And if such a big RCE vuln happens again, you're likely to hear about it and you can whitelist the update.
My two most precious digital possessions - my email and my Bitwarden account - are protected by a Yubikey that's always on my person (and another in another geographical location). I highly recommend such a setup, and it's not that much effort (I just keep my Yubikey with my house keys)
I got a bit scared reading the title, but I'm doing all I can to be reasonably secure without devolving into paranoia.
I think they mean to secure your most valuable accounts with a hardware token rather than in a normal password manager, so they aren't at risk if your password manager has an issue.
(disclaimer: I maintain the 2nd one, if I knew of the first, I wouldn't have released it, just didn't find something at that time, they do pretty much the same thing, mine in a bit of an overkill by using rust...)
> Russian locale kill switch: Exits silently if system locale begins with "ru", checking Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().locale and environment variables LC_ALL, LC_MESSAGES, LANGUAGE, and LANG
Does it matter? Lots of groups do such checks at startup at this point, because every news outlet who reports on it suddenly believe the group to be Russian if you do, so it's a no brainer to add today to misdirect even a little.
It's highly unlikely that the people behind an attack like this would come out (non-anonimously) and take credit. And it's unlikely they'll be caught. So does it matter to most peoplee if it's Russians, Americans, Iranians, North Koreans, or some other country?
If you're a 3-letter agency, you'd want to know and potentially arrest them, but as a random guy on the internet, or even a maintainer, I really don't think it matters.
So if it came out that the NSA was attempting to put backdoors in consumer password managers, it wouldn't change the context of the side channel attack? How about if it was a company (like Google)? It seemed like an unserious question because I can't understand how someone would think something like that wouldn't change the situation.
> So if it came out that the NSA was attempting to put backdoors in consumer password managers, it wouldn't change the context of the side channel attack?
Not really, we already know that NSA attempts shit like this all the time, if that came out, it'd be the same as the Snowden leaks meaning, a bunch of nerds going "Huh, who could have predicted this?". I don't see the point in it being Russia, China or the US, I'd like it as much if the US did it as Russia, so that's why I asked why it matters.
"Discretion is the better part of valor", "Never point it at your own feet", "Russian roulette is best enjoyed as a spectator", and many other sayings seem applicable.
That isn't a smoking gun. I think it was the Vault7 leaks which showed that the NSA and CIA deliberately leave trails like this to obfuscate which nation state did it. I'm sure other state actors do this as well, and it's not a particularly "crazy" technique.
It's not impossible, but most KeePass tools are written in sane languages and built with sane tooling, and don't use trash like Javascript and npm. Of course I'm not considering browser extensions or exclusive web-clients, but the main KeePass client has a good autotype system, so you don't really need to use the browser extension.
In any case, the fact that the official BitWarden client (which uses Electron btw) and even the CLI is written in Javascript/Typescript - should tell you everything you need to know about their coding expertise and security posture.
Fully agree, I can't wait for the day when developers finally stop using javascript for shit it was never designed for. .NET is decades ahead at this point.
> I don't understand how this solves the issue in this case.
I'd say since it is a local only tool, you don't really need to update it constantly provided you are a sane person that don't use a browser extension. It makes it easier to audit and yourself less at risk of having your tool compromised.
It doesn't have to be keypass though, it can be any local password management tool like pass[1] or its guis or simply a local encrypted file.
I need my passwords to be accessible from my infrastructure and my phone. How do you achieve this with KeePass? I assumed it was not possible, but in fairness, I haven't really gone down that rabbit hole to investigate.
Keepass is just a single file, you can share it between devices however you want (google drive, onedrive, dropbox, nextcloud, syncthing, rsync, ftp, etc); as long as you can read and write to it, it just works. There are keepass clients for just about everything (keepassxc for desktops, keepass2android or keepassdx for android, keepassium for iphone).
That is the problem, syncing isn't the most trivial problem especially for non technical folks. User experience is far superior in a fully managed solution.
I don't have any points of comparison since I've never used Bitwarden, but it works well enough for my purposes. It'll match the url, offer to autofill (sometimes those multiflow sites like Microsoft will trip it up, but you can always just right click -> enter username/password for a site and that'll work), and it does TOTP filling too.
You do use the browser extension because it's a strong anti-phishing defense.
If someone links me to "rnicrosoft.com" with a perfectly cloned login page, my eyes might not notice that it's a phishing link, but my browser extension will refuse to autofill, and that will cause me to notice.
Phishing is one of the most common attacks, and also one of the easiest to fall for, so I think using the browser extension is on-net more secure even though it does increase your attack surface some.
I know proper 2fa, like webauthn/fido/yubikeys, also solves this (though totp 2fa does not), but a lot of the sites I use do not support a security key. If all my sites supported webauthn, I think avoiding the browser extension would be defensible.
Not having an account for every single damn website + only login from websites you actually entered without following a link goes a long way to avoid that.
Sure there may be existence of typosquatting here and there but they tend to be much easier to spot vs the phising url using unicode variants.
I don't save browser cookies for obvious privacy reasons and it's absolutely a big deal to not need to pull up some program and copy paste my login details constantly for every site.
I try to limit my account creation to the minimum. HN is one of the few, for the better or for the worse as sometimes I just think I should nuke it and stop wasting time commenting.
I usually just use another profile for the stuff that I clear cookies when closing the profile. The other profiles I just use for a limited of sites that need logging in, each site is in its own container and I don't browse other sites on those profiles.
If I ever need to fill the login, I just do any of these:
- KeepassXC has auto-type feature, so I just choose the needed one and let it auto-type
- I enable the extension only when I need to log in and choose the one I need to fill (not auto-fill, but only fill when I click on the account from the extension pop-up dashboard).
Not op but I mean you can use a public cloud with Cryptomator on top if you don’t trust your password DB on a non E2E cloud. Or you can just use your own cloud (but then no access outside or can risk and open up infra), and then any of the well known clients on your phone. Can optionally sandbox them if possible and then just be mindful of sync conflicts with the DB file but I assume you, like most people, will 99.9% of the time be reading the DB not writing to it.
I never enjoyed the Android syncthing experience, so I just plug my phone in once a month and manually copy the vault over. I don't ever edit on my phone, so I don't need two-way syncing.
It renames one of them to $hostname_conflicted, or something like that.
Keepass has a built in tool for reconciling two databases, you can use that in this scenario.
By the way, syncthing can manage conflicts by keeping one copy of the file with a specific name and date. You can also decide is one host is the source of truth.
I use MacOS and iOS for home home devices and Windows for work, and use Strongbox on the Apple side with KeePassXC on the Windows side and sync them using DropBox.
Someone is about hop on and tell you how they simply run a Dropbox/GDrive to host their keepass vault and how that’s good enough for me (which should be Keepass’s tagline) and mobile they use a copy or some other manually derived and dependency ridden setup. They will support ad hoc over designed because their choice of ad hoc cloud is better than a service you use.
I use self-hosted Bitwarden (Vaultwarden) for this. It runs on my local network, and I have it installed on my phone etc. When I’m on my local network, everything works fine. When I’m not on my local network, the phone still has the credentials from the last time it was synced (i.e., last time it was used while the phone was on the home network). It’s a pretty painless way to keep things in sync without ever allowing Bitwarden to be accessible outside my home network.
In short, when I make a major password or credential change I do it from my laptop, consider that file on disk to be the "master" copy, and then manually sync the file on a periodic basis to my phone. I treat the file on the phone as read-only. Works fine so far.
To date there have been zero instances when I needed to significantly change a password/service/login/credential solely from my phone and I was unable to access my laptop.
Additionally the file gets synchronized to a workstation that sits in my home office accessible by personal VPN, where it can be accessed in a shell session with the keepass CLI: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/kpcli
You can use an extremely wide variety of your own choice of secure methods for how to get the file from the primary workstation (desktop/laptop) to your phone.
Which is great for Hacker News users that can maintain their own infra. But if we're talking "stress free", that's not an answer for the average user...
I do when I can, but there's a learning curve, and the rest of the world is trying to move those users in a very different direction (passkeys and other bullshit).
Password habits for many people are now decades-old, and very difficult to break.
Ok, single file, blah, blah. Realistically how do you sync that and how do you resolve conflicts? What happens if two devices add a password while offline, then go online?
I actually was a Bitwarden user at first, but over time in reality the frequency that I change email/password is not that much. It's not like I change those things every hour or every day like with my work files/documents and need constant syncing to the drive. And the chance that I add/change passwords at 2 devices at a close time is even less.
So gradually I don't feel I need syncing that much any more and switched to Keepass. I made my mind that I'll only change the database from my computer and rclone push that to any cloud I like (I'm using Koofr for that since it's friendly to rclone) then in any other devices I'll just rclone pull them after that when needed. If I change something in other devices (like phones), I'll just note locally there and change the database later.
But ofc if someone needs to change their data/password frequently then Bitwarden is clearly the better choice.
the only thing I can't find to do with keepass is how back up it in the cloud, like if you encrypt your back up, then where do you save that password, then where do you save the password for the cloud provider?.
This article is borderline malicious in how it skirts the facts.
This wasn't a case where KeePass was compromised in any way, as far as I can tell. This appears to be a basic case of a threat actor distributing a trojanized version via malicious ads. If users made sure they are getting the correct version, they were never in danger. That's not to say that a supply chain attack couldn't affect KeePass, but this article doesn't say that it has.
That looks like you'd have to download and run a hacked installer that was never avaliable from an official location. That is a much lower risk than a supply-chain attack where anyone building birwarden-cli from the official repo would be infected via the compromised dependency.
Long term keepass users aren't going to be affected. If you mention software to others make sure you send them a link to a known safe download location instead of having them search for one (as new users searching like that are more at risk of stumbling on a malicious copy of the official site hosting a hacked version).
That's an AI slop article. I'm not sure how someone creating their own installer and buying a few domains to distribute it is a mark against KeePass itself.
> The beacon established command and control over HTTPS
The part that seems most important here is that npm install was enough.
Once the compromise point is preinstall, the usual "inspect after install" mindset breaks down. By then the payload has already had a chance to run.
That gets more interesting with agents / CI / ephemeral sandboxes, because short exposure windows are still enough when installs happen automatically and repeatedly.
Another thing I think is worth paying attention to: this payload did not just target secrets, it also targeted AI tooling config, and there is a real possibility that shell-profile tampering becomes a way to poison what the next coding assistant reads into context.
I work on AgentSH (https://www.agentsh.org), and we wrote up a longer take on that angle here:
Nobody inspects packages after install, your theory has been debunked multiple times, caring about npm install running scripts is moot when you’ll inevitably run the actual binary after install.
And besides, you could always pull the package and inspect before running install, which unless you really know the installer and understand/know guarantees deeply (e.g., whether it’s possible for an install to deploy files outside of node_modules) it’s insane to even vaguely trust it to pull and unpack potentially malicious code.
> The affected package version appears to be @bitwarden/cli2026.4.0, and the malicious code was published in bw1.js, a file included in the package contents. The attack appears to have leveraged a compromised GitHub Action in Bitwarden’s CI/CD pipeline, consistent with the pattern seen across other affected repositories in this campaign.
It's typescript and pretty sure all of the Official Bitwarden clients are written in it.
I wrote a version in Python and then rust back before the official CLI was released. Now you can use https://github.com/doy/rbw instead, much better maintained (since I don't use Bitwarden anymore).
I have family I need to support, so I use 1password. It also helped that work gives me a 1P family plan free.
The practical differences to me:
* 1P is aimed at non-tech users more than Bitwarden.
* 1P lets you easily store things other than just passwords (serial #'s, license info, SSN's, etc) You can in Bitwarden, but it's a little annoying.
* 1P lets you store SSH keys(by effectively being an ssh-agent): https://developer.1password.com/docs/ssh/
All that said, I still happily recommend BW, especially for people that are cost-conscious, the free BW plan is Good Enough for most everyone.
Security wise, they are equivalent enough to not matter.
A supply chain issue that hadn’t happened to BW CLI before is exactly why you use other CLIs that seem to be identically vulnerable to the same issues?
The original pass is just a single shell script. It's short, pretty easy to read and likely in part because it's so simple, it's also very stable. The only real dependencies are bash, gnupg and optionally git (history/replication). These are most likely already on your machine and whatever channel you're getting them from (ex: distribution package manager) should be much more resilient to supply chain vulnerabilities.
It can also be used with a pgp smartcard (in my case a Yubikey) so all encryption/decryption happens on the smartcard. Every attempt to decrypt a credential requires a physical button press of the yubikey, making it pretty obvious if some malware is trying to dump the contents of the password store.
Edit: The CLI itself apparently does not, which will have limited the damage a bit, but if it's installed as a snap, it might. Incidents like this should hopefully cause a rollback of this dumb system of forcefully and frequently updating people's software without explicit consent.
I am glad I consciously decided not to put 2FA keys when I adopted bitwarden back in 2021, and manage them with Aegis. It was a bit of a hassle to setup backups, but it's good to split your points of failure.
So how likely is that these compromises will start affecting the non-cli and non-open-source tools ? For example other password managers (in the form of GUI's or browser extensions).
I recently had to disable their Chrome extension because it made the browser grind to a halt (spammed mojo IPC messages to the main thread according to a profiler). I wasn't the only one affected, going by the recent extension reviews. I wonder if it's related.
I've dramatically decreased my reliance on third-party packages and tools in my workflow. I switched from Bitwarden to Apple Passwords a few months ago, despite its worse feature set (though the impetus was Bitwarden crashing on login on my new iPad).
I've also been preferring to roll things on my own in my side projects rather than pulling a package. I'll still use big, standalone libraries, but no more third-party shims over an API, I'll just vibe code the shim myself. If I'm going to be using vibe code either way, better it be mine than someone else's.
I hope you're not using KeePassX, it's been unmaintained for years. KeePassXC is only available for Linux, which means I'd need to use a third-party app for Mac and iOS, so I'd be trusting three vendors instead of one.
Aside from passwords, I store passkeys, secure notes, and MFA tokens.
Remember how the White House published that document on memory safe languages? I think it’s time they go one step further and ban new development in JavaScript. Horrible language horrible ecosystem and horrible vulns.
Supply chain attacks aren't exclusive to JS just like malware isn't exclusive to Windows, it's just that JS/Windows is more popular and widespread. Kill JS and you will get supply chain attacks on the next most popular language with package managers. Kill Windows and you will get a flood of Linux/MacOS malware.
That's why I don't use any third-party password managers. You have to trust them not to fuck up security, updates, backups, etc. etc.
I wrote my own password generator - it's stateless, which has the advantage that I never have to back up or sync any data between devices. It just lets you enter a very long, secure master password, service name and a username then runs an scrypt hash on this with good enough parameters to make brute-force attacks unfeasible.
You had to install the CLI through NPM at a very short time frame for it to be affected. If you did get infected, you have to assume all secrets on your computer were accessed and that any executable file you had write access to may be backdoored.
It's a hard decision, I would say a cooldown by default in the last few months would have prevented more attacks than not upgrading to the latest version due to an immediate RCE, zero-click, EPSS 100%, CVSS 10.0, KEV mentioned Zero Day CVE. But now that the Mythos 90 days disclosure window gets closer, I don't know what tsunami of urgent patches is in our way... it's not an easy problem to solve.
I lean toward cooldown by default, and bypass it when an actual reachable exploitable ZeroDay CVE is released.
I mean, what's the future now? Everyone just vibecoding their own private tools that no "foreign government" has access to? It honestly feels like everything is slowly starting to collapse.
Also didn't Microsoft (the owner of GitHub) got access to Claude Mythos in order to "seCuRe cRitiCal SoftWaRe InfRasTructUre FoR teh AI eRa"? Hows securing GitHub Action going for them?
Once again, it is in the NPM ecosystem. OneCLI [0] does not save you either. Happens less with languages that have better standard libraries such as Go.
If you see any package that has hundreds of libraries, that increases the risk of a supply chain attack.
So the comparison here is that you would rather trust a password manager with a CLI that imports hundreds of third-party dependencies over a first party password manager with a CLI that comes with the OS?
I don't think macOS Keychain uses NPM and it isn't in TypeScript or Javascript and, yes it does not need a CLI either.
The NPM and Java/Typescript ecosystem is part of the problem that encourages developers to import hundreds of third-party libraries, due to its weak standard library which it takes at least ONE transitive dependency to be compromised and it is game over.
> You initially complained about CLIs, not the dependency mess of the JS ecosystem.
I complained about both. What does this say from the start?
>> Once again, it is in the NPM ecosystem.
> You still have not said why this is an issue of having a CLI.
Why do you need one? Automation reasons? OpenClaw? This is an attractive way for an attacker to get ALL your passwords in your vault. The breach itself if run in GitHub Actions would just make it a coveted target to compromise it which makes having one worse not better and for easier exfiltration.
So it makes even more sense for a password manager to not need a CLI at all. This is even before me mentioning the NPM and the Javascript ecosystem.
>Why do you need one? Automation reasons? OpenClaw? This is an attractive way for an attacker to get ALL your passwords in your vault.
I need one because I am not always using a graphical interface. What exactly in a GUI do you think makes it harder/less attractive for an attacker?
If the GUI code is compromised in the same way as the CLI, it'll have the same level of access to your vault as soon as you enter your master password, exactly the same as in the CLI.
It does not much matter if it imports 300 or 30 of them, those vulns will land somewhere in those 30 with equal frequency statistically. If you are advocating developing without dependencies at all, then please start (with any language) and show us all how much you actually ship.
JS is a target of these dumb accusations because it's literally the best cross-platform way to ship apps. Stop inventing issues where there are none.
That's a wild statement. The CLI is just another UI.
The problem in this case is JS and the NPM ecosystem. Go would be an improvement, but complexity is the enemy of security. Something like (pass)age is my preference for storing sensitive data.
Anyone know of a better way to protect yourself than setting a min release age on npm/pnpm/yarn/bun/uv (and anything else that supports it)?
Setting min-release-age=7 in .npmrc (needs npm 11.10+) would have protected the 334 unlucky people who downloaded the malicious @bitwarden/cli 2026.4.0, published ~19+ hours ago (see https://www.npmjs.com/package/@bitwarden/cli?activeTab=versi... and select "show deprecated versions").
Same story for the malicious axios (@1.14.1 and @0.30.4, removed within ~3h), ua-parser-js (hours), and node-ipc (days). Wouldn't have helped with event-stream (sat for 2+ months), but you can't win them all.
Some examples (hat tip to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47513932):
p.s. shameless plug: I was looking for a simple tool that will check your settings / apply a fix, and was surprised I couldn't find one, I released something (open source, free, MIT yada yada) since sometimes one click fix convenience increases the chances people will actually use it. https://depsguard.com if anyone is interested.EDIT: looks like someone else had a similar idea: https://cooldowns.dev
I like the idea of a cool down. But my next question is would this have been caught if no one updated? I know in practice not everyone would be on a cool down. But presumably this comprise was only found out because a lot of people did update.
> presumably this comprise was only found out because a lot of people did update
This was supposedly discovered by "Socket researchers", and the product they're selling is proactive scanning to detect/block malicious packages, so I'd assume this would've been discovered even if no regular users had updated.
But I'd claim even for malware that's only discovered due to normal users updating, it'd generally be better to reduce the number of people affected with a slow roll-out (which should happen somewhat naturally if everyone sets, or doesn't set, their cool-down based on their own risk tolerance/threat model) rather than everyone jumping onto the malicious package at once and having way more people compromised than was necessary for discovery of the malware.
Better for the cool down to be managed guaranteed centrally by the package forge rather than ad-hoc by each individual client.
That’s tricky, sometimes you really need the new version to be available right away.
There’s ways to handle that. But that’s the exception, not the rule.
foobarizer>=1.2.3 vs foobarizer==1.2.5
Cooldown sounds like a good idea ONLY IF these so called security companies can catch these malicious dependencies during the cooldown period. Are they doing this bit or individual researchers find a malware and these companies make headlines?
It seems less likely that they'll find it before you're bitten by it if you intentionally race against them by choosing newest all the time, yea?
Does it matter? The individual researchers could look at brand-new published packages just the same
For researchers who notice new releases as soon as they are published and discover malice based on that alone, I agree, and every step of that can be automated to some level of effectiveness.
But for researchers who aren't sufficiently effective until the first victim starts shouting that something went sideways, the malicious actor would be wise to simply ensure no victim is aware until well after the cooldown period, implementing novel obfuscation that evades static analysis and the like.
That assumes discovering a security bug is random and it could happen to anyone, so more shots on goal is better. But is that a good way to model it?
Ir seems like if you were at all likely to be giving dependencies the extra scrutiny that discovers a problem, you’d probably know it? Most of the people who upgraded didn’t help, they just got owned.
A cooldown gives anyone who does investigate more time to do their work.
It's a trade off for sure, maybe if companies could have "honeypot" environments where they update everything and deploy their code, and try to monitor for sneaky things.
It's easy for malicious code to detect sandboxing.
Also, check out the VW Diesel scandal.
If I were in charge of a package manager I would be seriously looking into automated and semi automated exploit detection so that people didn't have to yolo new packages to find out if they are bad. The checking would itself become an attack vector, but you could mitigate that too. I'm just saying _something_ is possible.
Don't write anything backend or cli tool in NPM would be good start
Other package managers are magically immune?
They are not, but npm is uniquely bad in that regard. Refusal to implement security features that would have made attacks like this harder really doesn't help https://github.com/node-forward/discussions/issues/29
The lack of a comprehensive standard library for JavaScript also results in projects pulling many more third party dependencies than you would with most other modern environments. It’s just a bigger attack surface. And if you can compromise a module used for basic functionality that you’d get out of the box elsewhere, the blast radius will be enormous.
Not to mention a culture of basically one-line packages ad infinitum. I downloaded a JS tool the other day to generate test reports and it had around 300 dependencies.
Needless to say I’m running all my JS tools in a Docker container these days.
So why hasn’t someone created a batteries include JS library? I don’t program in JS on the backend so I don’t know how feasible something like that is.
https://github.com/stdlib-js/stdlib was is one of several attempts at that, but yes the issue is that different people have very different views of what should be standard.
Everyone’s ideas of what batteries should be included differ
I, for one, root for AAA
You could write most of the cli tools using stdlib in python and go, without need for including hundreds of libraries even for trivial things.
yes obviously.
isn't it obvious?
it should be obvious.
why isn't obvious?
> Anyone know of a better way to protect yourself than setting a min release age on npm/pnpm/yarn/bun/uv (and anything else that supports it)?
Most of these attacks don't make it into the upstream source, so solutions[1] that build from source get you ~98% of the way there. If you can't get a from-source build vs. pulling directly from the registries, can reduce risk somewhat with a cooldown period.
For the long tail of stuff that makes it into GitHub, you need to do some combination of heuristics on the commits/maintainers and AI-driven analysis of the code change itself. Typically run that and then flag for human review.
[1] Here's the only one I know that builds everything from source: https://www.chainguard.dev/libraries
(Disclaimer: I work there.)
Build from source is a great idea, I assume you provide SLSA/sigstore like provenance as well?
The chainguard folks built sigstore :)
Yep yep, hence the ask, expected for containers, wondering if also for build from source.
> Anyone know of a better way to protect yourself than setting a min release age on npm/pnpm/yarn/bun/uv (and anything else that supports it)?
With pnpm, you can also use trustPolicy: no-downgrade, which prevents installing packages whose trust level has decreased since older releases (e.g. if a release was published with the npm cli after a previous release was published with the github OIDC flow).
Another one is to not run post-install scripts (which is the default with pnpm and configurable with npm).
These would catch most of the compromised packages, as most of them are published outside of the normal release workflow with stolen credentials, and are run from post-install scripts
Yep! depsguard sets trustPolicy: "no-downgrade" where applicable.
Stop using Javascript. Or Typescript or whatever excuses they have for the fundamentally flawed language that should have been retired eons ago instead of trying to get it fixed. Javascript, its ecosystem has always been a pack of cards. Time and again it has been proven again. I think this is like the 3rd big attack in the last 30 days alone.
Yes but it has nothing to do with the language, and everything to do with the ecosystem (npm tried to make thing such as mandatory MFA etc, npmjs is so big maintainers pushed back)
TypeScript on its own is a great language, with a very interesting type system. Most other type systems can’t run doom.
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/27/typescript-types-can-r...
This isn't a JS specific issue.
it is being attacked precisely because it is ubiquitous. no one is going to attack haskell, erlang or whatever no one uses.
Cooldowns are passing the buck. These are all caught with security scanning tools, and AI is probably going to be better at this than people going forward, so just turn on the cooldowns server-side. Package updates go into a "quarantine" queue until they are scanned. Only after scanning do they go live.
"Just" is doing a lot of work; most ecosystems are not set up or equipped to do this kind of server-side queuing in 2026. That's not to say that we shouldn't do this, but nobody has committed the value (in monetary and engineering terms) to realizing it. Perhaps someone should.
By contrast, a client-side cooldown doesn't require very much ecosystem or index coordination.
>Perhaps someone should
This kind of thinking is why I don't trust the security of open source software. Industry standard security practices don't get implemented because no one is being paid to actually care and they are disconnected from the users due to not making income from them.
Yeah, I should work on avoiding that word.
I think the rest of your analysis is correct! I'm only pushing back on perceptions that we can get there trivially; I think people often (for understandable reasons) discount the social and technical problems that actually dominate modernization efforts in open source packaging.
The approach you outline is totally compatible with an additional one or two day time gate for the artifact mirrors that back prod builds. Deploy in locked-down non-prod environments with strong monitoring after the scans pass, wait a few days for prod, and publicly report whatever you find, and you're now "doing your part" in real-time while still accounting for the fallibility of your automated tools.
There's risk there of a monoculture categorically missing some threats if everyone is using the same scanners. But I still think that approach is basically pro-social even if it involves a "cooldown".
I agree, even without project glasswing (that Microsoft is part of) even with cheaper models, and Microsoft's compute (Azure, OpenAI collaboration), it makes no sense that private companies needs to scan new package releases and find malware before npm does. I'm sure they have some reason for it (people rely on packages to be immediately available on npm, and the real use case of patching a zero day CVE quickly), but until this is fixed fundamentally, I'd say the default should be a cooldown (either serverside or not) and you'll need to opt in to get the current behavior. This might takes years of deprecation though, I'm sure it was turned on now, a lot of things would break. (e.g. every CVE public disclosure will also have to wait that additional cooldown... and if Anthropic are not lying, we are bound for a tsunami of patched CVEs soon...)
There are so many ways to self-host package repos that "immediate availability" to the wider npm-using public is a non-issue.
Exceptions to quarantine rules just invites attackers to mark malicious updates as security patches.
If every kind of breakage, including security bugs, results in a 2-3 hour wait to ship the fix, maybe that would teach folks to be more careful with their release process. Public software releases really should not be a thing to automate away; there needs to be a human pushing the button, ideally attested with a hardware security key.
Isn’t the problem with a minimum age release that the opposite would also occur - a high priority fix of zero day under exploit wouldn’t be fixed and you could be compromised in the window?
It is! It’s a tough problem to balance. The good news is that you can always override for specific cases. Linking to my other reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47880149
Regarding doing more than just a minimum release age: The tool I personally use is Aikido "safe-chain". It sets minimum release age, but also provides a wrapper for npm/uv/etc where upon trying to install anything it first checks each dependency for known or suspected vulnerabilities against an online commercial vulnerability database.
> ~/.config/uv/uv.toml > exclude-newer = "7 days"
Note the if you get
then comment out the exclude and runNever, ever type "npm -i". This advice has served me well for many years.
compartmentalize. I do development and anything finance / crypto related / sensitive on separate machines.
If you're brave you can run whonix.
The issue is developers who have publish access to popular packages - they really should be publishing and signing on a separate machine / environment.
Same with not doing any personal work on corporate machines (and having strict corp policy - vercel were weak here).
I use a separate dev user account (on macOS) for package installations, VSCode extensions, coding agents and various other developer activities.
I know it's far from watertight (and it's useless if you're working with bitwarden itself), but I hope it blocks the low hanging fruit sort of attacks.
Check your home folder permissions on macos, last time I checked mine were world readable (until I changed them). I was very surprised by it, and only noticed when adding an new user account for my wife.
I noticed that too (and changed it). The home folder appears to be world readable because otherwise sharing via the Public folder wouldn't work. The folders where the actual data lives are not world readable.
I think this is a bad idea, because it means the permissions of any new folders have to be closely guarded, which is easy to forget.
I guess this is the case for new installs, but for existing dependencies can’t you simply pin them to a patch release, and point at the sha?
Maybe using a slower, stable package manager that still gets security/bug fixes, like nix.
Renovate can do it as well
Yep, depsguard has support for renovate and dependabot cooldown settings too.
But how do you know which one is good? If foo package sends out an announcement that v1.4.3 was hacked, upgrade now to v1.4.4 and you're on v1.4.3, waiting a week seems like a bad idea. But if the hackers are the one sending the announcement, then you'd really want to wait the week!
malicious versions are recalled and removed when caught - so you don't need to update to the next version
An announcement isn't a quiet action. One would hope that the real maintainers would notice & take action.
Install tools using a package manager that performs builds as an unprivileged user account other than your own, sandboxes builds in a way that restricts network and filesystem access, and doesn't run let packages run arbitrary pre/post-install hooks by default.
Avoid software that tries to manage its own native (external, outside the language ecosystem) dependencies or otherwise needs pre/post-install hooks to build.
If you do packaging work, try to build packages from source code fetched directly from source control rather than relying on release tarballs or other published release artifacts. These attacks are often more effective at hiding in release tarballs, NPM releases, Docker images, etc., than they are at hiding in Git history.
Learn how your tools actually build. Build your own containers.
Learn how your tools actually run. Write your own CI templates.
My team at work doesn't have super extreme or perfect security practices, but we try to be reasonably responsible. Just doing the things I outlined above has spared me from multiple supply chain attacks against tools that I use in the past few weeks.
Platform, DevEx, and AppSec teams are all positioned well to help with stuff like this so that it doesn't all fall on individual developers. They can:
I think there's a lot of things to do here. The hardest parts are probably organizational and social; coordination is hard and network effects are strong. But I also think that there are some basics that help a lot. And developers who serve other developers, whether they are formally security professionals or not, are generally well-positioned to make it easier to do the right thing than the sloppy thing over time.The problem with cooldowns is that the more people use them, the less effective they become.
The hypothesis you're referring to is something like "if everyone uses a 7-day cooldown, then the malware just doesn't get discovered for 7 days?", right?
An alternative hypothesis: what if 7-day cooldowns incentivize security scanners, researchers, and downstream packagers to race to uncover problems within an 7-day window after each release?
Without some actual evidence, I'm not sure which of these is correct, but I'm pretty sure it's not productive to state either one of these as an accepted fact.
Well, luckily, those who find the malicious activity are usually companies who do this proactively (for the good of the community, and understandably also for marketing). There are several who seem to be trying to be the first to announce, and usually succeed. IMHO it should be Microsoft (as owners of GitHub, owners of npm) who should take the helm and spend the tokens to scan each new package for malicious code. It gets easier and easier to detect as models improve (also gets easier and easier to create, and try to avoid detection on the other hand)
That was my first instinct as well but I'm not sure how true it really is.
Many companies exist now whose main product is supply chain vetting and scanning (this article is from one such company). They are usually the ones writing up and sharing articles like this - so the community would more than likely hear about it even if nobody was actually using the package yet.
care to elaborate?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47773812
Top comment has a great explicit refutation:
> This plan works by letting software supply chain companies find security issues in new releases. Many security companies have automated scanners for popular and less popular libraries, with manual triggers for those libraries which are not in the top N.
Haha what if there's an urgent security fix in an updated package?
Manually review the package and override the setting
The flaw of the cooldown solution speaks for itself.
Still it's something like a second factor (or even, literally, overriding might require 2FA).
Yep, that's the main argument against cooldowns, but there are ways to override them. I'll update the docs soon.
https://github.com/doy/rbw is a Rust alternative to the Bitwarden CLI. Although the Rust ecosystem is moving in NPM's direction (very large and very deep dependency trees), you still need to trust far fewer authors in your dependency tree than what is common for Javascript.
Well.. https://github.com/doy/rbw/blob/main/Cargo.toml#L16
You're still pulling a lot of dependencies. At least they're pinned though.
That's just direct dependencies. Including all the dependency tree is 785k LOC according to lib.rs. Most rust libraries include tons of others.
https://lib.rs/crates/rbw
326 packages right now when doing a build. Seems large in general, but for a Rust project, not abnormal.
Takes what, maybe 15 seconds to compile on a high-core machine from scratch? Isn't the end of the world.
Worse is the scope to have to review all those things, if you'd like to use it for your main passwords, that'd be my biggest worry. Luckily most are well established already as far as I can tell.
Why are you talking about compile times in a thread about supply chain security.
326 packages is approximately 326 more packages than I will ever fully audit to a point where my employer would be comfortable with me making that decision (I do it because many eyes make bugs shallow).
It's also approximately 300 more than the community will audit, because it will only be "the big ones" that get audited, like serde and tokio.
I don't see people rushing to audit `zmij` (v1.0.19), despite it having just as much potential to backdoor my systems as tokio does.
"326 seems large, but not abnormal" was the state of JS in the past as well.
Chance of someone auditing all of them is virtually zero, and in practice no one audits anything, so you are still effectively blindly trusting that none of those 326 got compromised.
It is baffling to me that a language that is as focused on safety/security as Rust decided to take the JavaScript approach to their ecosystem. I find it rather contradictory.
I doubt Microsoft's kernel/system Rust code is pulling in a lot of crates. The Linux kernel sure isn't, and Android's Bluetooth stack doesn't seem to either.
Using crates is a choice. You can write fully independent C++ or you can pull in Boost + Qt + whatever libraries you need. Even for C programs, I find my package manager downloading tons of dependencies for some programs, including things like full XML parsers to support a feature I never plan to use.
Javascript was one of the first languages to highlight this problem with things like left-pad, but the xz backdoor showed that it's also perfectly possible to do the same attack on highly-audited programs written in a system language that doesn't even have a package manager.
That's because you're mixing things. "Rust the language" isn't the one starting new projects and add new dependencies that have hundreds of dependencies of their own, this is the doing of developers. The developers who built Rust with a focus on safety and security is not the same developers mentioned before.
Rust and Cargo are, if not inseparable, at least tightly connected. Rust and Rust's stdlib are inseparable.
Cargo is modeled after NPM. It works more or less identically, and makes adding thousands of transient dependencies effortless, just like NPM.
Rust's stdlib is pretty anemic. It's significantly smaller than node's.
These are decisions made by the bodies governing Rust. It has predictable results.
ohh noo, the devs gave users a choice instead of forcing their hand..
Design decisions have predictable consequences. Large masses of people, who make up an ecosystem like the that of a programming language community, respond predictably to their environment. Each individual programmer has a choice, sure, but you can't just "individual responsibility" your way out of the predictable consequences of incentive structures.
That's true. But it does seem like a logic result of having no real standard library. That lone fact has kept me away from Rust for real projects, because I don't want to pull in a bunch of defacto-standard-but-not-officially dependencies for simple tasks. That's probably a large contributor to the current state of dependency bloat.
Yeah, it does require you to be meticulous about what you depend on. Personally I stick with libraries that don't use 100s of other crates, and tried and reviewed various libraries over the year, so you have your "toolkit" of libraries you know are well built and you know how they work internally.
Ultimately in any language you get the sort of experience you build for yourself with the environment you setup, it is possible in most languages to be more conservative and minimal even if the ecosystem at large is not, but it does require more care and time.
'no real standard library' doesn't seem entirely fair. Rust has a huge standard library. What it does have is the policy to only include "mature" things with little expected API evolution in the standard libary, which leaves gaping holes where a json parser, a http client or a logging library should be. Those are all those defacto-standard-but-not-officially dependencies
Perhaps that’s just a sign Rust isn’t suitable for those type of projects.
What exactly would you have done differently?
Cargo made its debut in 2014, a year before the infamous left-pad incident, and three years before the first large-scale malicious typosquatting attacks hit PyPI and NPM. The risks were not as well-understood then as they are today. And even today it is very far from being a solved problem.
Same here.
Does this take into account feature flags when summing LOC? It's common practice in Rust to really only use a subset of a dependency, controlled by compile-time flags.
My experience has been that while there's significant granularity in terms of features, in practice very few people actively go out of their way to prune the default set because the ergonomics are kind of terrible, and whether or not the default feature set is practically empty or pulls in tons of stuff varies considerably. I felt strongly enough about this that I wrote up my only blog post on this a bit over a year ago, and I think most of it still applies: https://saghm.com/cargo-features-rust-compile-times/
Also just unit tests in the source files, which again aren’t included in the binary via compile-time flags!
For a given tool, I'd expect the Rust version to have even more deps than the JS version because code reuse is more important in a lower-level language. I get the argument that JS users are on average less competent than Rust users, but we're talking about authors who build serious tools/libs in the first place.
> At least they're pinned though.
Frustratingly, they're not by default though; you need to explicitly use `--locked` (or `--frozen`, which is an alias for `--locked --offline`) to avoid implicit updates. I've seen multiple teams not realize this and get confused about CI failures from it.
The implicit update surface is somewhat limited by the fact that versions in Cargo.toml implicitly assume the `^` operator on versions that don't specify a different operator, so "1.2.3" means "1.2.x, where x >= 3". For reasons that have never been clear to me, people also seem to really like not putting the patch version in though and just putting stuff like "1.2", meaning that anything other than a major version bump will get pulled in.
> The implicit update surface is somewhat limited by the fact that versions in Cargo.toml implicitly assume the `^` operator on versions that don't specify a different operator, so "1.2.3" means "1.2.x, where x >= 3". For reasons that have never been clear to me, people also seem to really like not putting the patch version in though and just putting stuff like "1.2", meaning that anything other than a major version bump will get pulled in.
Not quite: "1.2.3" = "^1.2.3" = ">=1.2.3, <2.0.0" in Cargo [0], and "1.2" = "^1.2.0" = ">=1.2.0, <2.0.0", so you get the "1.x.x" behavior either way. If you actually want the "1.2.x" behavior (e.g., I've sometimes used that behavior for gmp-mpfr-sys), you should write "~1.2.3" = ">=1.2.3, <1.3.0".
[0] https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/specifying-depende...
I don't know how I got this wrong because I literally went and looked at that page to try to remind myself, but I somehow misread it, because you're definitely right. This probably isn't the first time I've gotten this wrong either.
From thinking it through more closely, it does actually seem like it might be a little safer to avoid specifying the patch version; it seems like putting 1.2.3 would fail to resolve any valid version in the case that 1.2.2 is the last non-yanked version and 1.2.3 is yanked. I feel like "1.2.3" meaning "~1.2.3" would have been a better default, since it at least provides some useful tradeoff compared to "1.2", but with the way it actually works, it seems like putting a full version with no operator is basically worse than either of the other options, which is disappointing.
Is there a plan to change this? I don't see why --locked shouldn't be the default
I haven't heard anything about this, but I really wish it was there by default. I don't think the way it works right now fits anyone's expectations of what the lockfile is supposed to do; the whole point of storing the resolved versions in a file is to, well, lock them, and implicitly updating them every time you build doesn't do that.
As one of the original authors of Cargo, I agree. lockfiles are for apps and CLIs are apps. QED.
Since you're here, and you happened to indirectly allude to something that seems to have become increasingly common in the Rust world nowadays, I can't help but be curious about your thoughts on libraries checking their lockfiles into version control. It's not totally clear to me exactly when or why it became widespread, but it used to be relatively rare for me to see in open source libraries in the first few post-1.0 years of Rust, whereas at this point I think it's more common for me to see than not.
Do you think it's an actively bad practice, completely benign, or something in between where it makes sense in some cases but probably should still be avoided in others? Offhand, the only variable I can think of that might influence a different choice is that maybe closed-source packages been reused within a company (especially if trying to interface with other package management systems, which I saw firsthand when working at AWS but I'm guessing is something other large companies would also run into), but I'm curious if there are other names nuances I haven't thought of
> It's not totally clear to me exactly when or why it became widespread
It’s not exactly a tough nut to crack: it changed 2-ish years ago after guidance (and cargo’s defaults) changed: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2023/08/29/committing-lockfiles/
It should be fine to do this according to semver as long as the major version is above zero.
Sure, but according to semver it's also totally fine to change a function that returns a Result to start returning Err in cases that used to be Ok. Semver might be ae to project from your Rust code not compiling after you update, but it doesn't guarantee it will do the same thing the next time you run it. While changes like that could still happen in a patch release, I'd argue that you're losing nothing by forgoing new API features if all you're doing is recompiling the existing code you have without making any changes, so only getting patches and manually updating for anything else is a better default. (That said, one of the sibling comments pointed out I was actually wrong about the implicit behavior of Cargo dependencies, so what I recommended doesn't protect from anything, but not for the reasons it sounds like you were thinking).
Some people might argue that changing a function to return an error where it didn't previously would be a breaking change; I'd argue that those people are wrong about what semver means. From what I can tell, people having their own mental model of semver that conflicts with the actual specification is pretty common. Most of the time when I've had coworkers claim that semver says something that actively conflicts with what it says, after I point out the part of the spec that says something else, they end up still advocating for what they originally had said. This is fine, because there's nothing inherently wrong with a version schema other than semver, but I try to push back when the term itself gets used incorrectly because it makes discussions much more difficult than they need to be.
Wait, you're telling me that node deps are not pin by default. Every time you run your code you might be pulling in a new version.
No wonder...
Node deps are pinned: https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v8/configuring-npm/package-lock-j...
The problem is that you also want to update deps.
Why?
Because they could have a security flaw that might compromise your project or any users of it.
It's a bit ironic that everyone considers Rust as safer while completely ignoring the heavily increased risk of pulling in malware in dependencies.
This + vaultwarden is an awesome self-hostable rust version of bitwarden. We might as well close the loop!
Is there any downside to using the firefox builtin password manager?
Does it support autofill for other apps on mobile? I'd argue that putting passwords in your phone clipboard could itself be risky (although for someone who's extremely security conscious, maybe discouraging using apps isn't a downside)
Reddit is always pasting clipboard.
So uninstall Reddit? That app is spyware at best and malware at worst.
I'm guessing you meant to respond to the sibling comment rather than mine
Yes, weirdly enough at the time there was no reply button, I thought HN comments had a maximum nested depth, but now it has a reply button and so does yours. Weird.
Ah, no worries! Replies seem to get throttled sometimes when the site detects a lot of nested replies quickly and it intentionally delays the ability to reply a bit. I've always assumed that it's intended as a way to try to mitigate threads that potentially are devolving into flamewars.
I wonder if this is going to push more software to stacks like .Net where you can do most things with zero third-party dependencies.
Or, conversely, encourage programming languages to increase the number of features in their standard libraries.
A few months ago I tried to build a .NET package on Linux, and the certificate revocation checks for the dependencies didn't complete even after several minutes. Eventually I found out about the option `NUGET_CERTIFICATE_REVOCATION_MODE=offline`, which managed to cause the build to complete in a sane amount of time.
It's hard for me to take seriously any suggestion that .NET is a model for how ecosystems should approach dependency management based on that, but I guess having an abysmal experience when there are dependencies is one way to avoid risks. (I would imagine it's probably not this bad on Windows, or else nobody would use it, but at least personally I have no interest in developing on a stack that I can't expect to work reliably out of the box Linux)
go and python exits with sane stdlib and are already used extensively
Oh nice it works as an ssh-agent too. Definitely checking this one out.
That’s my concern too. Rust has the same dependency concerns, which is how hackers get into code. VaultWarden has the same Rust dependency concern. Ironically we’re entering an age where C/C++ seems to have everything figured out from a dependency injection standpoint
Now all they need to figure out is how to actually make the C/C++ code that isn't from dependencies secure and they'll be all set
The issue was a compromised build pipeline that shipped a poisoned package.
But PSA: If something is critical to the business and you’re using npm, pin your dependencies. I’ve had this debate with other devs throughout the years and they usually point to the lockfile as assurance, but version ranges with a ^ mean that when the lockfile gets updated, you can pull in newer versions you didn’t explicitly choose.
If what you're building can put your company out of business it's worth the hassle.
This is one reason why we have lock files / version pinning
But it goes the other way too. If there's a security vulnerability that was fixed in a later version, you want the system to automatically pick that up and apply it for you in an ideal scenario.
Even with ^ you won't get an updated version until somebody runs an install and updates the lockfile.
We have things like dependebot for this.
https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/tutorials/secure-yo...
At this point, the risk of a compromised package outweighs the risk of an upstream vuln that actually matters. Npm audit is full of junk like client side redos vulns, you could probably ignore 90%+ of the reports and still be secure against the majority of of-concern attack classes.
Why would you patch a security vuln in a later version? Should be patched in all versions.. that's what semver is for.
A patch updates is a newer version, and they are just as likely to be compromised by supply chain attacks as minor or major updates.
Not exactly.
Security patches aren't like bugs or features where you can just roll a new version. Often patches need to be backported to older versions allowing software and libraries to be "upgraded" in place with no other change introduced.
Say you had software that controlled the careful mix of chemicals introduced into a municipal water supply. You just don't move from version 1.4 to 3.2, you fix 1.4 in place.
No, you create version 1.4.19, which fixes a bug in 1.4.18.
Who is 'you' here? All of the npm package maintainers?
Yes, if they all just backport security patches we'll be fine. No, people are not going to just.
Ah yes the incredibly common practice of... checks notes backporting security packages in node packages.
Semver doesn't help if you just declare all older versions EOL.
What you're looking for are Debian stable packages. :p
I had a really bad experience with the bitwarden cli. I believe it was `bw list` that I ran, assuming it would list the names of all my passwords, but too my surprise, it listed everything, including passwords and current totp codes. That's not the worst of it though. For some reason, when I ssh'ed into one of my servers and opened tmux, where I keep a weechat irc client running, I noticed that the entire content of the bw command was accessible from within the weechat text input field history. I have no idea how this happened, but it was quite terrifying. The issue persisted across tmux and weechat sessions, and only a reboot of the server would solve the problem.
I promptly removed the bw cli programme after that, and I definitely won't be installing it again.
I use ghostty if it matters.
I love how the first comment is a complain having nothing to do with the actual subjec
Password managers are all about trust, the main link is about a compromise, so it's not surprising that the first comment is also about trust too, even if it's not directly about this particular compromise.
I found the default bwcli clunky and unacceptable, and it's why I don't use it, even though I still have a BitWarden subscription.
Where's the evidence that 1024kb's issue had anything to do with bw? How is that vaguely recalled anecdote a trust issue with bw? It was probably caused by accidentally copying something to the clipboard or some other buffer which was then transferred via ssh and imported into weechat, possibly with the help of custom terminal, ssh, tmux, or weechat settings making it too easy for data to be slung around like that.
I can't think of a plausible explanation for how bw is at fault for its terminal output ending up, across a ssh session and tmux invocation, in the chat history of weechat. Even if bw auto-copied its output to the clipboard (which as far as I could tell by glancing at the cli options, it doesn't and can't), and the clipboard is auto-copied to remote hosts, clipboard contents shouldn't appear in an irc client's history without explicit hacking to do that.
The claim is just noise, particularly because it doesn't seem to have ever been investigated.
It seems prudent, if someone wants to use a cli, to use rbw rather than bw, or even just pass or keypassxc-cli (and self-managed cloud backup or syncing). However, that's based on bw being a javascript mess, not based on the unlikely event of bw injecting its output through ssh into irc clients.
Not to mention utter nonsense. There’s no possible way that BW CLI somehow injected command history into a remote server. That was 100% something the GP did, a bug in their terminal, or a config they have with ssh/tmux, not Bitwarden.
that's our future... with AI. Engineers that don't know the difference between client-side convenience and server-side injection, how to configure `php.ini`, or that no synchronized password manager is safe. While the OAuth scope is `*`, and CORS is what you drink on the weekend.
Can someone explain why people struggle with CORS?
The full strength of the SOP applies by default. CORS is an insecurity feature that relaxes the SOP. Unless you need to relax the SOP, you shouldn't be enabling CORS, meaning you shouldn't be sending an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header at all.
If your front-end at www.example.com makes calls to api.example.com, then it's simple enough to just add www.example.com to CORS.
IME, CORS is pretty straightforward in prod but can be a huge pain in dev environments, so you end up with lots of little hacks to get your dev environments working (and then one of those hacks leaks back into prod and now you have CORS problems in prod).
This. This is a result of not having proper environments and engineering practices in place and so the team or engineer is free to just wing it and add hacks around security best practices because the Security Team (tm) is elsewhere and they never understand the ask. They know PKI and certificates, access card identity, maybe Cisco for their "cyber security" but that's usually where it ends. Yet somehow, they are in charge of CORS and TLS and Sast/Dast scans and everything else that should be baked into the pipelines and process. Resulting in an engineer saying f'it and adding an `if localhost` hack or something. CORS is one example but there are many others in pretty much every area of security. OAuth, CORS, LDAP, Secrets, Hashing, TOTP, you name it. Each has a plethora of packages and libraries that can "do" the thing but it always becomes a hairball mess to the dev because they never understood it to begin with.
That simple prod example isn't where people struggle with CORS. It's during development and I've got assets on Cloudflare and AWS and GCP and localhost:3000 and localhost:8000, and localhost:3001 and then a VM in Hetner at API.example.com because why not, that shit gets complicated and people get confused and lost. I mean, yeah, don't do that, but CORS gets complicated once the project gets enough teams involved.
I’ve found that the best way to deal with this is to add an entry to /etc/hosts for my local machine that fits the pattern for QA environment. Then I run a local reverse proxy with a self signed certificate.
So I do local dev on https://local.qa.yourappnamehere.com
We've had all those well before AI.
> no synchronized password manager is safe
Care to elaborate? I'd agree that the security/availability tradeoff is different, but "not safe" is as nonsensical a blanket statement as "all/only offline/paper-based/... password managers are safe".
Probably terminal emulator is like iTerm2 and double click to select and copy to clipboard is feature.
I thought that CLI would be efficent when I looked for using it and then I figured it is JavaScript
Exactly. That is the problem.
There is a time and place for where it makes sense and a password manager CLI written in TypeScript importing hundreds of third-party packages is a direct red flag. It is a frequent occurrence.
We have seen it happen with Axios which is one of the biggest supply chain attacks on the Javascript / Typescript ecosystem and it makes no sense to build sensitive tools with that.
> importing hundreds of third-party packages
But how else are you going to check if a number is even or odd? Remember, the ONLY design goal is not repeating yourself (or in fact anything anyone has ever thought of implementing).
That’s a serious red flag. I’m concerned and I don’t think it shows a security first culture.
Wow. Thats crazy. Is there an extension for bwcli in weechat? BTW I didnt even know BW had a cli until now. I use keepass locally.
It's crazy because it's not default bw behavior, or even any bw behavior... I don't use the cli, but I don't see any built-in capacity to copy bw output to the clipboard. (In the UNIX way, you'd normally pipe it to a clipboard utility if you wanted it copied, and then the security consequences are on you.)
They probably caused it themselves, somehow, and then blamed bitwarden. Note in the original comment they aren't even entirely sure what the command was, and they weren't familiar with it or they wouldn't have been surprised by its output... so how can they be sure what else they did between that command and the weechat thing?
If the terminal or tmux fed terminal history into weechat, that's also not bw's problem.
`bw list` shows plaintext credentials in the CLI https://bitwarden.com/help/cli/#list
I know this because I had the same surprised reaction
I don't know, I use a vanilla weechat setup
Never used the CLI, but I do use their browser plugin. Would be quite a mess if that got compromised. What can I do to prevent it? Run old --tried and tested-- versions?
Quite bizarre to think much much of my well-being depends on those secrets staying secret.
Integration points increase the risk of compromise. For that reason, I never use the desktop browser extensions for my password manager. When password managers were starting to become popular there was one that had security issues with the browser integration so I decided to just avoid those entirely. On iOS, I'm more comfortable with the integration so I use it, but I'm wary of it.
The problem is that the UX with a browser extension is so much better.
I also find it far easier to resist accidentally entering credentials in a phishing site... I'm pretty good about checking, but it's something I tend to point out to family and friends to triple check if it doesn't auto suggest the right site.
Exactly. Same principle of passkeys, Yubikeys and FIDO2. Much harder to phish because the domains have to match.
I’m impressed with their feature to add the URL for next time, after manually filling on an unmatched URI. Hairs raised on neck clicking confirm though.
Importantly IMO is the extra phishing protection that the UX is really nice if and only if the url matches what's expected. If you end up on a fake url somehow, it's a nice speed bump that it doesn't let you auto-fill to make you think, hold on, something is wrong here.
If you're used to the clunkier workflow of copy-pasting from a separate app, then it's much easier to absent-mindedly repeat it for a not-quite-right url.
The 1Password mobile and desktop apps have such a nice UX that I’m happy copy pasting from and into it instead of having any of the browser extensions enabled.
I have 1Password configured to require password to unlock once per 24 hours. Rest of the time I have it running in the background or unlock it with TouchID (on the MacBook Pro) or FaceID (on the iPhone).
It also helps that I don’t really sign into a ton of services all the time. Mostly I log into HN, and GitHub, and a couple of others. A lot of my usage of 1Password is also centered around other kinds of passwords, like passwords that I use to protect some SSH keys, and passwords for the disk encryption of external hard drives, etc.
> The 1Password mobile and desktop apps have such a nice UX that I’m happy copy pasting from and into it instead of having any of the browser extensions enabled.
Also a great way of missing out on one of the best protections of password managers; completely eliminating phishing even without requiring thinking. And yes, still requires you to avoid manually copy-pasting without thinking when it doesn't work, but so much better than the current approach you're taking, which basically offers 0 protection against phishing.
My approach is that for critical sites like banking, I use the site URL stored in the password manager too, I don't navigate via any link clicking. I personally am fine with thinking when my entire net worth is potentially at stake.
It's not only about how you get there, but that the autofill shows/doesn't show, which is the true indicator (beyond the URL) if you're in the right place or not.
Rouge browser extensions for example could redirect you away from the bank website (if the bank website has poor security) when you go there, so even if you use the URL from the password manager, if you don't use the autofill feature, you can still get phished. And if the autofill doesn't show, and you mindlessly copy-paste, you'd still get phished. It's really the autofill that protects you here, not the URL in the password manager.
If you have rogue browser extensions installed, the browser extension can surely read the values that got filled into the login page without having to redirect to another site.
Not necessarily, a user could have accepted a permission request for some (legit) redirect extension that never asked for content permission, then when the rogue actor takes over, they want to compromise users and not change the already accepted permissions.
Concretely, I think for redirect browser extension users I'd use "webRequest" permission, while for in page access you'd need a content-script for specific pages, so in practice they differ in what the extension gets access to.
You don't need a autofill for a indicator. Simply bookmark your banks login page, even if it gets silently redirected later you will notice as the page wont be bookmarked anymore.
In Safari on iOS I have all the main pages I use as favourites, so that they show on the home screen of Safari.
Likewise I have links in the bookmarks bar on desktop.
I use these links to navigate to the main sites I use. And log in from there.
I don’t really need to think that way either.
But I agree that eliminating the possibility all-together is a nice benefit of using the browser integration, that I am missing out on by not using it.
Which works great until tags.tiqcdn.com, insuit.net or widget-mediator.zopim.com (example 3rd party domains loaded when you enter the landing page from some local banks) get compromised. I guess it's less likely to happen with the bigger banks, my main bank doesn't seem to load any scripts from 3rd party as an counter-example. Still, rouge browser extensions still scare me, although I only have like three installed.
> The problem is that the UX with a browser extension is so much better.
It's better, but calling it so much better [that it's unreasonable to forgo the browser extension] is a bit silly to me.
1. Go to website login page
2. trigger the global shortcut that will invoke your password manager
3. Your password manager will appear with the correct entry usually preselected, if not type 3 letters of the site's name.
4. Press enter to perform the auto type sequence.
There, an entire class of exploits entirely avoided. No more injecting third party JS in all pages. No more keeping an listening socket in your password manager, ready to give away all your secrets.
The tradeoff? You now have to manually press ctrl+shift+space or whatever instead when you need to log in.
The tradeoff is that you need to know how to setup a global shortcut or even know it's even possible. I wish people would stop minimizing the knowledge they have as something everyone just knows.
How do you set up this shortcut? I'd prefer to get rid of extensions, if for no better reason than sometimes it switches to my work profile and I have to re-login
Also, you want to avoid exposing your passwords through the clipboard as much as possible.
On unix-like OSes you can use `xsel` and configure it to clear clipboard after a single paste and/or after a set period of time.
On iOS I feel I have less control over what's running than on Linux (dont get me started on Windows or Android). So that's the order of how I dare to use it. But a supply chain attack: I'll always use a distributed program: the only thing I can do is only use old versions, and trusted distribution channels.
In theory the browser integration shouldn’t leak anything beyond the credentials being used, even if compromised.
When you use autofill, the native application will prompt to disclose credentials to the extension. At that point, only those credentials go over the wire. Others remain inaccessible to the extension.
We need cooldowns everywhere, by default. Development package managers, OS package managers, browser extensions. Even auto-updates in standalone apps should implement it. Give companies like Socket time to detect malicious updates. They're good at it, but it's pointless if everyone keeps downloading packages just minutes after they're published.
Exactly this. For anyone who wants to do it for various package managers:
This would have protected the 334 people who downloaded @bitwarden/cli 2026.4.0 ~19h ago (according to https://www.npmjs.com/package/@bitwarden/cli?activeTab=versi...). Same for axios last month (removed in ~3h). Doesn't help with event-stream-style long-dormant attacks but those are rarer.(plug: released a small CLI to auto-configure these — https://depsguard.com — I tried to find something that will help non developers quickly apply recommended settings, and couldn't find one)
https://cooldowns.dev/#javascript-ecosystem ;-)
Love it, I'll link to it!
That is why we have discussions like these: https://x.com/i/status/2039099810943304073
X is the worst place to hold community discussions.
I am not sure that works - imagine that the next shellshock had been found. Would you want to wait 7 days to update?
We need to either screen everybody or cut of countries like North Korea and Iran from the Internet.
These vulnerabilities are all caught by scanners and the packages are taken down 2-3 hours after going live. Nothing needs to take 7 days, that's just a recommendation. But maybe all packages should be scanned, which apparently only takes a couple of hours, before going live to users?
Shellshock was in 2014 and Log4Shell was 2021. It's far more likely that you're going to get pwned by using a too-recent unreviewed malicious package than to be unknowingly missing a security update that keeps you vulnerable to easy RCEs. And if such a big RCE vuln happens again, you're likely to hear about it and you can whitelist the update.
> What can I do to prevent it?
My two most precious digital possessions - my email and my Bitwarden account - are protected by a Yubikey that's always on my person (and another in another geographical location). I highly recommend such a setup, and it's not that much effort (I just keep my Yubikey with my house keys)
I got a bit scared reading the title, but I'm doing all I can to be reasonably secure without devolving into paranoia.
If the software gets poisoned then your YubiKey will not save you.
I think they mean to secure your most valuable accounts with a hardware token rather than in a normal password manager, so they aren't at risk if your password manager has an issue.
Use the desktop or web vault directly, don't use the browser plugin.
How are they clearly less susceptible to a supply chain attack?
Maybe the web vault, but then we do not know when it's compromised (that's the whole idea); so we trust them not to've made a mess...
How to prevent it?
tl;dr
- https://cooldowns.dev
- https://depsguard.com
(disclaimer: I maintain the 2nd one, if I knew of the first, I wouldn't have released it, just didn't find something at that time, they do pretty much the same thing, mine in a bit of an overkill by using rust...)
Do either of those work on browser extensions that I install as a user? I don't see anything relating to extensions in there.
You should use hunter2 as your password on all services.
That password cannot be cracked because it will always display as ** for anyone else.
My password is *****. See? It shows as asterisks so it's totally safe to share. Try it!
... Scnr •́ ‿ , •̀
ah, the old bash.org.
> Russian locale kill switch: Exits silently if system locale begins with "ru", checking Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().locale and environment variables LC_ALL, LC_MESSAGES, LANGUAGE, and LANG
So bold and so cowards at the same time...
The worst thing is that you can't even tell if that's "real" or just a false flag.
Does it matter? Lots of groups do such checks at startup at this point, because every news outlet who reports on it suddenly believe the group to be Russian if you do, so it's a no brainer to add today to misdirect even a little.
If walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it is a russian spy masqueraded like a duck. Russia is at cold war with NATO.
My point is that it could still be Russia, as they know that we know it is used as a false flag.
My point is; what changes if we knew for a fact it was Russia or that it was someone else?
>My point is; what changes if we knew for a fact it was Russia or that it was someone else?
Is this a serious question?
Sounds serious to me
It's highly unlikely that the people behind an attack like this would come out (non-anonimously) and take credit. And it's unlikely they'll be caught. So does it matter to most peoplee if it's Russians, Americans, Iranians, North Koreans, or some other country?
If you're a 3-letter agency, you'd want to know and potentially arrest them, but as a random guy on the internet, or even a maintainer, I really don't think it matters.
So if it came out that the NSA was attempting to put backdoors in consumer password managers, it wouldn't change the context of the side channel attack? How about if it was a company (like Google)? It seemed like an unserious question because I can't understand how someone would think something like that wouldn't change the situation.
Does the nsa really need that ? 99% of our services are hosted on American servers, which the nsa already has full access.
Why would you steal the key when you're already in the house ?
And for the high profile, like some Iranian scientist who has the code to something important, they wouldn't use things like bitwarden.
I really see no use case when the nsa would need access to your bitwarden vault.
> So if it came out that the NSA was attempting to put backdoors in consumer password managers, it wouldn't change the context of the side channel attack?
Not really, we already know that NSA attempts shit like this all the time, if that came out, it'd be the same as the Snowden leaks meaning, a bunch of nerds going "Huh, who could have predicted this?". I don't see the point in it being Russia, China or the US, I'd like it as much if the US did it as Russia, so that's why I asked why it matters.
for most people, nothing.
for threat intel people, a lot.
"Discretion is the better part of valor", "Never point it at your own feet", "Russian roulette is best enjoyed as a spectator", and many other sayings seem applicable.
Smells like blackmail from another nation..
That isn't a smoking gun. I think it was the Vault7 leaks which showed that the NSA and CIA deliberately leave trails like this to obfuscate which nation state did it. I'm sure other state actors do this as well, and it's not a particularly "crazy" technique.
So, Russia is no longer a target for CIA?
ah yes, because everyone sets locale on their npm publish github CI job.
obvious misdirection, but it does serve to make it very obvious it was a state actor.
> but it does serve to make it very obvious it was a state actor
Lol no, lots of groups do this, non-state ones too.
KeePass users continue to live the stress free live.
I've managed to avoid several security breaches in last 5 years alone by using KeePass locally on my own infra.
I don't understand how this solves the issue in this case.
Bitwarden vaults were not compromised, there was a problem in a tool you used to access the secrets.
What makes it impossible for KeePass access tools to have these issues?
It's not impossible, but most KeePass tools are written in sane languages and built with sane tooling, and don't use trash like Javascript and npm. Of course I'm not considering browser extensions or exclusive web-clients, but the main KeePass client has a good autotype system, so you don't really need to use the browser extension.
In any case, the fact that the official BitWarden client (which uses Electron btw) and even the CLI is written in Javascript/Typescript - should tell you everything you need to know about their coding expertise and security posture.
Fully agree, I can't wait for the day when developers finally stop using javascript for shit it was never designed for. .NET is decades ahead at this point.
>What makes it impossible for KeePass access tools to have these issues?
the superiority of keepass users scares away the bad actors
> I don't understand how this solves the issue in this case.
I'd say since it is a local only tool, you don't really need to update it constantly provided you are a sane person that don't use a browser extension. It makes it easier to audit and yourself less at risk of having your tool compromised.
It doesn't have to be keypass though, it can be any local password management tool like pass[1] or its guis or simply a local encrypted file.
[1] https://www.passwordstore.org/
Why are browser extensions not sane in your opinion?
Browser password manager extensions are like putting a dog door on your reinforced vault door. Giant increase in attack surface.
I need my passwords to be accessible from my infrastructure and my phone. How do you achieve this with KeePass? I assumed it was not possible, but in fairness, I haven't really gone down that rabbit hole to investigate.
Keepass is just a single file, you can share it between devices however you want (google drive, onedrive, dropbox, nextcloud, syncthing, rsync, ftp, etc); as long as you can read and write to it, it just works. There are keepass clients for just about everything (keepassxc for desktops, keepass2android or keepassdx for android, keepassium for iphone).
That is the problem, syncing isn't the most trivial problem especially for non technical folks. User experience is far superior in a fully managed solution.
How is the quality of browser extensions compared to Bitwarden?
I don't have any points of comparison since I've never used Bitwarden, but it works well enough for my purposes. It'll match the url, offer to autofill (sometimes those multiflow sites like Microsoft will trip it up, but you can always just right click -> enter username/password for a site and that'll work), and it does TOTP filling too.
You don't use a browser extension if you are serious about security anyway.
You do use the browser extension because it's a strong anti-phishing defense.
If someone links me to "rnicrosoft.com" with a perfectly cloned login page, my eyes might not notice that it's a phishing link, but my browser extension will refuse to autofill, and that will cause me to notice.
Phishing is one of the most common attacks, and also one of the easiest to fall for, so I think using the browser extension is on-net more secure even though it does increase your attack surface some.
I know proper 2fa, like webauthn/fido/yubikeys, also solves this (though totp 2fa does not), but a lot of the sites I use do not support a security key. If all my sites supported webauthn, I think avoiding the browser extension would be defensible.
Not having an account for every single damn website + only login from websites you actually entered without following a link goes a long way to avoid that.
Sure there may be existence of typosquatting here and there but they tend to be much easier to spot vs the phising url using unicode variants.
I guess I better just use same password everywhere then…
How do you autofill from your db then?
I don't autofill. It may be less user friendly but it is not that big of a deal.
I don't save browser cookies for obvious privacy reasons and it's absolutely a big deal to not need to pull up some program and copy paste my login details constantly for every site.
I try to limit my account creation to the minimum. HN is one of the few, for the better or for the worse as sometimes I just think I should nuke it and stop wasting time commenting.
I usually just use another profile for the stuff that I clear cookies when closing the profile. The other profiles I just use for a limited of sites that need logging in, each site is in its own container and I don't browse other sites on those profiles.
If I ever need to fill the login, I just do any of these:
- KeepassXC has auto-type feature, so I just choose the needed one and let it auto-type - I enable the extension only when I need to log in and choose the one I need to fill (not auto-fill, but only fill when I click on the account from the extension pop-up dashboard).
Not op but I mean you can use a public cloud with Cryptomator on top if you don’t trust your password DB on a non E2E cloud. Or you can just use your own cloud (but then no access outside or can risk and open up infra), and then any of the well known clients on your phone. Can optionally sandbox them if possible and then just be mindful of sync conflicts with the DB file but I assume you, like most people, will 99.9% of the time be reading the DB not writing to it.
Avoid Onedrive btw - it thinks encrypted files are ransomware; previous use resulted in nonstop ransomware warnings after cryptomator use
Syncthing can synchronize Keepass files between devices quite well.
I rely on this too, but counting down the days android no longer lets syncthing touch another app's files :(
I never enjoyed the Android syncthing experience, so I just plug my phone in once a month and manually copy the vault over. I don't ever edit on my phone, so I don't need two-way syncing.
It would be strange if Android locked that down further than even iOS - Keepassium on iOS can open files from any sync app IIRC
What happens if you add a new item on two devices simultaneously?
It renames one of them to $hostname_conflicted, or something like that. Keepass has a built in tool for reconciling two databases, you can use that in this scenario.
Why would you do that?
By the way, syncthing can manage conflicts by keeping one copy of the file with a specific name and date. You can also decide is one host is the source of truth.
I use MacOS and iOS for home home devices and Windows for work, and use Strongbox on the Apple side with KeePassXC on the Windows side and sync them using DropBox.
For me it is nextcloud + wireguard
Someone is about hop on and tell you how they simply run a Dropbox/GDrive to host their keepass vault and how that’s good enough for me (which should be Keepass’s tagline) and mobile they use a copy or some other manually derived and dependency ridden setup. They will support ad hoc over designed because their choice of ad hoc cloud is better than a service you use.
I use self-hosted Bitwarden (Vaultwarden) for this. It runs on my local network, and I have it installed on my phone etc. When I’m on my local network, everything works fine. When I’m not on my local network, the phone still has the credentials from the last time it was synced (i.e., last time it was used while the phone was on the home network). It’s a pretty painless way to keep things in sync without ever allowing Bitwarden to be accessible outside my home network.
I mean there are ways i.e. if you run something like tailscale and can always access your private network etc. but it is a hassle.
Plus, now you're responsible for everything. Backups, auditing etc.
In short, when I make a major password or credential change I do it from my laptop, consider that file on disk to be the "master" copy, and then manually sync the file on a periodic basis to my phone. I treat the file on the phone as read-only. Works fine so far.
To date there have been zero instances when I needed to significantly change a password/service/login/credential solely from my phone and I was unable to access my laptop.
Additionally the file gets synchronized to a workstation that sits in my home office accessible by personal VPN, where it can be accessed in a shell session with the keepass CLI: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/kpcli
You can use an extremely wide variety of your own choice of secure methods for how to get the file from the primary workstation (desktop/laptop) to your phone.
Which is great for Hacker News users that can maintain their own infra. But if we're talking "stress free", that's not an answer for the average user...
what "infra"? keepass works locally, and just opens a database file. it works the same as any other password manager.
Most other password managers have a cloud component so if your local storage breaks or gets lost you don't lose all your passwords.
The average user is reusing their password everywhere, and rotation means changing the numeral 6 at the end of the password to 7.
We should be encouraging those users to switch to a password manager.
I do when I can, but there's a learning curve, and the rest of the world is trying to move those users in a very different direction (passkeys and other bullshit).
Password habits for many people are now decades-old, and very difficult to break.
Ok, single file, blah, blah. Realistically how do you sync that and how do you resolve conflicts? What happens if two devices add a password while offline, then go online?
I actually was a Bitwarden user at first, but over time in reality the frequency that I change email/password is not that much. It's not like I change those things every hour or every day like with my work files/documents and need constant syncing to the drive. And the chance that I add/change passwords at 2 devices at a close time is even less.
So gradually I don't feel I need syncing that much any more and switched to Keepass. I made my mind that I'll only change the database from my computer and rclone push that to any cloud I like (I'm using Koofr for that since it's friendly to rclone) then in any other devices I'll just rclone pull them after that when needed. If I change something in other devices (like phones), I'll just note locally there and change the database later.
But ofc if someone needs to change their data/password frequently then Bitwarden is clearly the better choice.
the only thing I can't find to do with keepass is how back up it in the cloud, like if you encrypt your back up, then where do you save that password, then where do you save the password for the cloud provider?.
You save the single password in your head. All other passwords go inside Keepass.
Same as Bitwarden? You just need to remember Keepass password, just like remember Bitwarden password.
> KeePass users continue to live the stress free live.
https://cyberpress.org/hackers-exploit-keepass-password-mana...
This article is borderline malicious in how it skirts the facts.
This wasn't a case where KeePass was compromised in any way, as far as I can tell. This appears to be a basic case of a threat actor distributing a trojanized version via malicious ads. If users made sure they are getting the correct version, they were never in danger. That's not to say that a supply chain attack couldn't affect KeePass, but this article doesn't say that it has.
That looks like you'd have to download and run a hacked installer that was never avaliable from an official location. That is a much lower risk than a supply-chain attack where anyone building birwarden-cli from the official repo would be infected via the compromised dependency.
Long term keepass users aren't going to be affected. If you mention software to others make sure you send them a link to a known safe download location instead of having them search for one (as new users searching like that are more at risk of stumbling on a malicious copy of the official site hosting a hacked version).
This AI generated article is not about vulnerabilities in KeePass, rather about malicious KeePass clones.
Happy 1password user for more than a decade.
It's only a matter of time until _they_ are also popped :(.
I think most people use keepassxc, not original keepass.
That's an AI slop article. I'm not sure how someone creating their own installer and buying a few domains to distribute it is a mark against KeePass itself.
> The beacon established command and control over HTTPS
The part that seems most important here is that npm install was enough.
Once the compromise point is preinstall, the usual "inspect after install" mindset breaks down. By then the payload has already had a chance to run.
That gets more interesting with agents / CI / ephemeral sandboxes, because short exposure windows are still enough when installs happen automatically and repeatedly.
Another thing I think is worth paying attention to: this payload did not just target secrets, it also targeted AI tooling config, and there is a real possibility that shell-profile tampering becomes a way to poison what the next coding assistant reads into context.
I work on AgentSH (https://www.agentsh.org), and we wrote up a longer take on that angle here:
https://www.canyonroad.ai/blog/the-install-was-the-attack/
Nobody inspects packages after install, your theory has been debunked multiple times, caring about npm install running scripts is moot when you’ll inevitably run the actual binary after install.
And besides, you could always pull the package and inspect before running install, which unless you really know the installer and understand/know guarantees deeply (e.g., whether it’s possible for an install to deploy files outside of node_modules) it’s insane to even vaguely trust it to pull and unpack potentially malicious code.
What's particularly impressive about this attack is that the attackers must have precisely coordinated it with Github not being down.
Github has had some recent uptime issues
https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
To use a fitting turn of phrase, "Many such cases."
How many times will this happen before people realise that updating blind is a poor decision?
> The affected package version appears to be @bitwarden/cli2026.4.0, and the malicious code was published in bw1.js, a file included in the package contents. The attack appears to have leveraged a compromised GitHub Action in Bitwarden’s CI/CD pipeline, consistent with the pattern seen across other affected repositories in this campaign.
Writing a cli with JavaScript? No thank you.
It's typescript and pretty sure all of the Official Bitwarden clients are written in it.
I wrote a version in Python and then rust back before the official CLI was released. Now you can use https://github.com/doy/rbw instead, much better maintained (since I don't use Bitwarden anymore).
What do you use?
I have family I need to support, so I use 1password. It also helped that work gives me a 1P family plan free.
The practical differences to me:
All that said, I still happily recommend BW, especially for people that are cost-conscious, the free BW plan is Good Enough for most everyone.Security wise, they are equivalent enough to not matter.
Bitwarden can also act as an ssh-agent: https://bitwarden.com/help/ssh-agent/
Ah, nice!
This is precisely why I don't use BW CLI. Use pass or gopass for all your CLI tokens and sync them via a private git repo.
Keep the password manager as a separate desktop app and turn off auto update.
A supply chain issue that hadn’t happened to BW CLI before is exactly why you use other CLIs that seem to be identically vulnerable to the same issues?
That's just not true.
The original pass is just a single shell script. It's short, pretty easy to read and likely in part because it's so simple, it's also very stable. The only real dependencies are bash, gnupg and optionally git (history/replication). These are most likely already on your machine and whatever channel you're getting them from (ex: distribution package manager) should be much more resilient to supply chain vulnerabilities.
It can also be used with a pgp smartcard (in my case a Yubikey) so all encryption/decryption happens on the smartcard. Every attempt to decrypt a credential requires a physical button press of the yubikey, making it pretty obvious if some malware is trying to dump the contents of the password store.
Narrower blast radius than the 2022 LastPass breach, at least the vaults weren't touched.
Does the CLI auto-update?
Edit: The CLI itself apparently does not, which will have limited the damage a bit, but if it's installed as a snap, it might. Incidents like this should hopefully cause a rollback of this dumb system of forcefully and frequently updating people's software without explicit consent.
Also the time range provided in https://community.bitwarden.com/t/bitwarden-statement-on-che... can help with knowing if you were at risk. I only used the CLI once in the morning yesterday (ET), so I might not have been affected?
I think you had to have installed the CLI during that time-frame, then ran the brand new installed CLI to be vulnerable.
Assuming you had it already installed, you would be safe.
I checked a machine this morning and it had updated itself at Apr 23 1715G
I've purged the snap. Really should purge snapd completely.
I am glad I consciously decided not to put 2FA keys when I adopted bitwarden back in 2021, and manage them with Aegis. It was a bit of a hassle to setup backups, but it's good to split your points of failure.
I'm just hearing about this attack on Checkmarx.
We recently adopted it at work, and I find the thing to just produce garbage. I've never tuned out noise so quickly.
you have to appreciate the irony of a thing that's supposed to help protect you from vulnerabilities being one.
I think this is the real news. There seems to be an ongoing attack against Checkmarx.
That thing is expensive as he'll and used by lots of huge corps. I know at least one very large one in Mexico ... where the IT team is pretty useless.
So, I dont doubt the possibility that in the short future we will hear about more hacks.
So how likely is that these compromises will start affecting the non-cli and non-open-source tools ? For example other password managers (in the form of GUI's or browser extensions).
FYI, Raycast users, the bitwarden-cli version used with the bundled bitwarden extension is 2026-03-01, not the compromised one (2026-04-01).
https://github.com/raycast/extensions/blob/6765a533f40ad20cc...
I recently had to disable their Chrome extension because it made the browser grind to a halt (spammed mojo IPC messages to the main thread according to a profiler). I wasn't the only one affected, going by the recent extension reviews. I wonder if it's related.
> CLI builds were affected [...]
> Bitwarden’s Chrome extension, MCP server, and other legitimate distributions have not been affected yet.
Bitwarden statement - https://community.bitwarden.com/t/bitwarden-statement-on-che...
Somehow thats good because the rest of the Bitwarden apps will benefit from the increased tightness of their tooling and ci/cd
Their website is also incredibly bad. I am not paying for it so it might be better for paying users.
It is mind boggling how an app that just lists a bunch of items can be so bloated.
I've dramatically decreased my reliance on third-party packages and tools in my workflow. I switched from Bitwarden to Apple Passwords a few months ago, despite its worse feature set (though the impetus was Bitwarden crashing on login on my new iPad).
I've also been preferring to roll things on my own in my side projects rather than pulling a package. I'll still use big, standalone libraries, but no more third-party shims over an API, I'll just vibe code the shim myself. If I'm going to be using vibe code either way, better it be mine than someone else's.
Why not stick to simple/heavily vetted password managers (like keepassx)? is there some advanced feature you use?
I hope you're not using KeePassX, it's been unmaintained for years. KeePassXC is only available for Linux, which means I'd need to use a third-party app for Mac and iOS, so I'd be trusting three vendors instead of one.
Aside from passwords, I store passkeys, secure notes, and MFA tokens.
KeePassXC is cross-platform, unsure about iOS.
Sorry, you're right, I missed the tabs on top. No iOS support though.
Seamless syncing is the primary reason I stick with BW
I was literally thinking about installing the cli a few days ago to ease the use in a few places. Now I'm glad I didn't.
This doesn't affect the web extension, no?
This will continue to happen more and more, until legislation is passed to require a software building code.
> Checkmarx is an information security company specializing in software application security testing and risk management for software supply chains.
The irony! The security "solution" is so often the weak link.
The adage that security companies are often worse at software security than the median non-security company continues to hold water.
Last month it was trivy: https://github.com/aquasecurity/trivy/security/advisories/GH...
I am working on a project you can self host on Cloudflare with one command, to store secrets and passwords there. It has a cli similar to doppler
https://github.com/remorses/sigillo
Remember how the White House published that document on memory safe languages? I think it’s time they go one step further and ban new development in JavaScript. Horrible language horrible ecosystem and horrible vulns.
Supply chain attacks aren't exclusive to JS just like malware isn't exclusive to Windows, it's just that JS/Windows is more popular and widespread. Kill JS and you will get supply chain attacks on the next most popular language with package managers. Kill Windows and you will get a flood of Linux/MacOS malware.
Maybe language based package managers aren't great. Also, npm has design decisions that make it especially prone to supply chain attacks iirc
JS apps need more direct dependencies and transitives to do basic things vs. other languages.
That's why I don't use any third-party password managers. You have to trust them not to fuck up security, updates, backups, etc. etc.
I wrote my own password generator - it's stateless, which has the advantage that I never have to back up or sync any data between devices. It just lets you enter a very long, secure master password, service name and a username then runs an scrypt hash on this with good enough parameters to make brute-force attacks unfeasible.
For anything important, I also use 2FA.
Looks like Bitwarden has a statement here, https://community.bitwarden.com/t/bitwarden-statement-on-che...
I wonder if 1Password CLI is a top priority for hackers similarly.
i'm sure it is, but it's written in Rust so it should be a little harder to pwn
some coffee apps will be malicious now with 'melange' as IoC haha.. and Navigator xD... but i guess netscape is kinda malware o.O.
on a more serious note. i told you so levels reaching new heights. dont use password managers. dont handoff this type of risk to a third party.
its like putting all your keys in a flimsy lockbox outside of your appartment. at some point someone will trip over it, find the keys and explore -_-.
it being impractical with the amount of keys/passwords you need to juggle?
not an excuse. problem should and can be solved differently.
If I run the compromised CLI, do they get all my passwords?
Exactly, that could widen the blast radius of this particular compromise significantly.
Read the article
Where does it answer this question in the article?
kinda crazy to see this comment required in this particular context, yet here we are
It's an understandable question, the article reads like an AI generated mess.
The article explains what is extracted.
The article waffles on forever and gives some generic advice.
Meanwhile, Bitwarden themselves state that end users were almost never affected: https://community.bitwarden.com/t/bitwarden-statement-on-che...
You had to install the CLI through NPM at a very short time frame for it to be affected. If you did get infected, you have to assume all secrets on your computer were accessed and that any executable file you had write access to may be backdoored.
No it doesn't?
Yes it does, under technical analysis. I don’t want to paste it here when it’s laid out in the article…
It seems to be describing what the Checkmarx vulnerability allows to be done on a GitHub Actions runner?
No, at least according to Bitwarden themselves: https://community.bitwarden.com/t/bitwarden-statement-on-che...
From my understanding the checkmarx attack could have been prevented by the asfaload project I'm working on. See https://github.com/asfaload/asfaload
It is:
- open source
- accountless(keys are identity)
- using a public git backend making it easily auditable
- easy to self host, meaning you can easily deploy it internally
- multisig, meaning event if GitHub account is breached, malevolent artifacts can be detected
- validating a download transparantly to the user, which only requires the download url, contrary to sigstore
Another day, another supply chain attack involving GitHub Actions.
GitHub was down too! Its uptime has been so bad recently.
It’s the new Npm
This one also involved npm to be fair
Don't GitHub Actions actually use npm?
The new Windows 98
they were cooked the minute they chose to write it in typescript
How the hell are most people supposed to balance the risk of not updating software against the risk of updating software?
It's a hard decision, I would say a cooldown by default in the last few months would have prevented more attacks than not upgrading to the latest version due to an immediate RCE, zero-click, EPSS 100%, CVSS 10.0, KEV mentioned Zero Day CVE. But now that the Mythos 90 days disclosure window gets closer, I don't know what tsunami of urgent patches is in our way... it's not an easy problem to solve.
I lean toward cooldown by default, and bypass it when an actual reachable exploitable ZeroDay CVE is released.
Use a package repository that fast-tracks security updates, like Debian Stable.
I mean, what's the future now? Everyone just vibecoding their own private tools that no "foreign government" has access to? It honestly feels like everything is slowly starting to collapse.
Also didn't Microsoft (the owner of GitHub) got access to Claude Mythos in order to "seCuRe cRitiCal SoftWaRe InfRasTructUre FoR teh AI eRa"? Hows securing GitHub Action going for them?
Dont write clis in Javascript.
> THE MOST TRUSTED PASSWORD MANAGER
> Defend against hackers and data breaches
> Fix at-risk passwords and stay safe online with Bitwarden, the best password manager for securely managing and sharing sensitive information.
yep. literally from their website this moment..and the link to their "statement"[0] is nowhere on the front page.
Oh wait, there is a top banner..."Take insights to action: Bitwarden Access Intelligence now available Learn more >" nope.
[0]: https://community.bitwarden.com/t/bitwarden-statement-on-che...
Can we please get a break?
Praying to the security gods.
It seems like we've have non-stop supply chain attacks for months now?
Expect to continue for years to come
This is the break right now, we will smile back on these times
Stock up on pencils and paper guys.
Crap. I use that CLI.
Once again, it is in the NPM ecosystem. OneCLI [0] does not save you either. Happens less with languages that have better standard libraries such as Go.
If you see any package that has hundreds of libraries, that increases the risk of a supply chain attack.
A password manager does not need a CLI tool.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47585838
> A password manager does not need a CLI tool.
A password manager absolutely does need a CLI tool??
> A password manager does not need a CLI tool.
Why not? Even macos keychain supports cli.
The above comment is just a bunch of generalizations not meant to address seriously that's why.
So the comparison here is that you would rather trust a password manager with a CLI that imports hundreds of third-party dependencies over a first party password manager with a CLI that comes with the OS?
I don't think macOS Keychain uses NPM and it isn't in TypeScript or Javascript and, yes it does not need a CLI either.
The NPM and Java/Typescript ecosystem is part of the problem that encourages developers to import hundreds of third-party libraries, due to its weak standard library which it takes at least ONE transitive dependency to be compromised and it is game over.
You initially complained about CLIs, not the dependency mess of the JS ecosystem.
You still have not said why this is an issue of having a CLI.
> You initially complained about CLIs, not the dependency mess of the JS ecosystem.
I complained about both. What does this say from the start?
>> Once again, it is in the NPM ecosystem.
> You still have not said why this is an issue of having a CLI.
Why do you need one? Automation reasons? OpenClaw? This is an attractive way for an attacker to get ALL your passwords in your vault. The breach itself if run in GitHub Actions would just make it a coveted target to compromise it which makes having one worse not better and for easier exfiltration.
So it makes even more sense for a password manager to not need a CLI at all. This is even before me mentioning the NPM and the Javascript ecosystem.
>Why do you need one? Automation reasons? OpenClaw? This is an attractive way for an attacker to get ALL your passwords in your vault.
I need one because I am not always using a graphical interface. What exactly in a GUI do you think makes it harder/less attractive for an attacker?
If the GUI code is compromised in the same way as the CLI, it'll have the same level of access to your vault as soon as you enter your master password, exactly the same as in the CLI.
It does not much matter if it imports 300 or 30 of them, those vulns will land somewhere in those 30 with equal frequency statistically. If you are advocating developing without dependencies at all, then please start (with any language) and show us all how much you actually ship.
JS is a target of these dumb accusations because it's literally the best cross-platform way to ship apps. Stop inventing issues where there are none.
I guess anyone/anything using a non-graphical interface should just not use a password manager for some reason?
Not to mention that a graphical application is just as vulnerable to supply chain attacks.
I seems like we need better standard libraries, but standard libraries turn into tarpits. I sort of like the way python's stdlib works.
Yeah Im going to have to agree with this
> A password manager does not need a CLI tool.
That's a wild statement. The CLI is just another UI.
The problem in this case is JS and the NPM ecosystem. Go would be an improvement, but complexity is the enemy of security. Something like (pass)age is my preference for storing sensitive data.