alt Hacker News> exfiltrated a npm token with broad publish rights
I freaking HATE tokens. I hate them.
There should be a better way to do authentication than a glorified static password.
An example of how to do it correctly: Github as a token provider for AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/use-iam-roles-to-conne... But this is an exception, rather than a rule.
Replies
Well the idea behind tokens is that they should be time and authZ limited. In most cases they are not so they degrade to a glorified static password.
Solutions like generating them live with a short lifetime, using solutions like oauth w/ proper scopes, biscuits that limit what they can do in detail, etc, all exist and are rarely used.
Trusted publishing is a thing now for many package registries, including npm: https://github.blog/changelog/2025-07-31-npm-trusted-publish...
As another sibling comment have put it, it probably should be short lived or behind a manual verification (passphrase, 2fa,…)
These machine-to-machine OIDC flows seem secure, and maybe they are when they’re implemented properly, but they’re really difficult to configure. And I can’t shake the feeling that they’re basically just “tokens with more moving parts,” at least for a big chunk of exploitation paths. Without a human in the loop, there’s still some “thing” that gets compromised, whether it’s a token or something that generates time-limited tokens.
In the case of this worm, the OIDC flow wouldn’t even help. The GitHub workflow was compromised. If the workflow was using an OIDC credential like this to publish to npm, the only difference would be the npm publish command wouldn’t use any credential because the GitHub workflow would inject some temporary identity into the environment. But the root problem would remain: an untrusted user shouldn’t be able to execute a workflow with secret parameters. Maybe OIDC would limit the impact to be more fine-grained, but so would changing the token permissions.