Securely publishing to NPM, the OpenStack way

- 3 mins read

The following article has been making the rounds, claiming a new worm exploit against npm. First of all, this is not a new exploit, nor is it in any way unique to npm – pip, gem, rpm, and deb have the same issue. Many may not even consider this an exploit at all – it’s a known feature, provided by package repositories, that permit compiling platform-specific bytecode. This is useful if, for instance, your package depends on a c-level library.

The exploit works something like this:

  1. If you are easily authenticated against a package repository, and…
  2. …you install a package which compiles and runs someone else’s code, then…
  3. …an attacker can execute malicious code which can publish itself to your packages…
  4. …which will then subsequently infect anyone who fuzzily matches against your packages’ versions.

This is not news. Mitigation approaches exist. Here’s how we do it in OpenStack:

Step 1: Do not use privileged build environments

Every test, package, or other build command runs on a throwaway jenkins slave that only exists for that test, after which it is deleted. While during test setup the jenkins user begins with passwordless sudo, that privileged is almost always revoked before the tests are run. In short, even if malicious code is downloaded during npm install, it is never executed in an environment that permits a privilege escalation attack.

This approach doesn’t have to be restricted to our Cloud VM’s either. You can do this with docker images, vagrant boxes, you name it.

Step 2: Build an intermediary tarball with npm pack

<a href="https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/pack" target="_blank">npm pack</a> builds a release tarball from a given package, in our case the current project at its release version tag. We do this on the above-mentioned throwaway slave, so that any scripts executed during the construction process cannot access any credentials. After construction, this tarball is uploaded to tarballs.openstack.org, from which anyone can retrieve it.

Step 3: Publish without scripts

OpenStack’s infrastructure contains one jenkins slave that possesses credentials necessary to publish artifacts. Its sole purpose in life is to download a release tarball, and to push that tarball to a package repository. In npm’s case, we execute npm publish <tarball> --ignore-scripts, to ensure that none of the packages’ lifecycle events are accidentally executed, further isolating us from unexpected attacks.

Other security measures

In addition to the above publishing flow, we also have several policies in place intended to ensure that our packages are trustworthy.

  • Only one user owns our npm packages. This prevents other owners from accidentally compromising the package.
  • Only verified, gpg-signed git tags using registered keys will trigger our publish jobs. To easily enable this, add git-sign-tag=true to your global or local .npmrc (Of course, you’ll need to be able to sign a tag).
  • We strongly prefer using strict version matching in our packages, which also has the benefit of making our builds deterministic. The fastest way for you to accomplish this yourself is to commit your shrinkwrap file to version control.
  • We don’t just publish our code via npm; If you’d prefer using a git dependency, or a tarball link, that option is open to you.