alt Hacker NewsI've been waiting for something like this to happen. It's just too easy to pull off. I've been hard-pinning all of my versions of dependencies and using older versions in any new projects I set up for a little while, because they've generally at least been around long enough to vet. But even that has its own set of risks (for example, what if I accidently pin a vulnerable version). Either that, or I fork everything, including all the deps, run LLMs over the codebase to vet everything.
Even still though, we can't really trust any open-source software any more that has third party dependencies, because the chains can be so complex and long it's impossible to vet everything.
It's just too easy to spam out open-source software now, which also means it's too easy to create thousands of infected repos with sophisticated and clever supply chain attacks planted deeply inside them. Ones that can be surfaced at any time, too. LLMs have compounded this risk 100x.
> Even still though, we can't really trust any open-source software any more that has third party dependencies, because the chains can be so complex and long it's impossible to vet everything.
This is why software written in Rust scares me. Almost all Rust programs have such deep dependency trees that you really can't vet them all. The Rust and Node ecosystems are the worst for this, but Python isn't much better. IMO it's language-specific package managers that end up causing this problem because they make it too easy to bring in dependencies. In languages like C or C++ that traditionally have used system package managers the cost of adding a dependency is high enough that you really avoid dependencies unless they're truly necessary.