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- no one is talking about NPM libraries. we’re talking about released packages.
- you absolutely can ensure a binary hasnt been tampered with. its called checksumming.
- you’re confusing MITM attacks with supply chain attacks. MITM attacks are far easier to pull off.
Not everything is provided with a package manager
Yes. thats precisely the problem we’re pointing out to you. if you’re going to provide software over the internet provide a proper package with checksum validation. its not hard, stop providing bash scripts.
we all know what you meant. you’re just incorrect, your conflating multiple different types of attacks and asserting the one that is easiest to resolve is an equivalent problem. shrug
many devs i’ve encountered in the wild (FANG/startups/randomly) can barely sort a list without causing problems. so now we have people hosting multiple servers they probably didn’t configure correctly. meaning instead of a few centralized repositories we need to secure we now have to trust these individual people have enough technical know how to safely host such a setup.
thats the problem with these setups. its not the developer being a bad actor we’re worried about, its the systems they’ve setup to serve these scripts. with checksums and side channels its easy to validate the resulting binary. which can effectively nips any issues with a compromised repository.