You Should Not Update Your Dependencies

IMO the best practice is to leave dependencies unpinned, but use a lock file, and only update the lock file a few times a year. Upgrade enough that you don’t get stuck, but not often enough to expose yourself to supply chain attacks every time CI runs.

It's another startup sales pitch. Their argument is the entire ecosystem is screwed, but it's okay, you can run their uber complicated toolchain in a CI pipeline and that will fix everything, by reviewing all of the code of your dependency updates. (because all the other backdoored code was never reviewed? because you're better at reviewing upstream code than the upstream maintainers?)

My take is the "hot take" nobody likes to hear. I think you should actually follow standard security best practices. Don't update constantly to the latest bleeding edge versions, but do update to the latest security patched versions. Do pin your versions (and SHA hashes of releases). Do keep an artifact repository. Do cryptographic verification of artifacts. Do validate every dependency you add, understand who made it, what it does. Do try to minimize your dependencies. Do review every new dependency and see what it is you're pulling into your application and whitelist the sources and their signed keys. Do use code signing. Do use OAuth, ephemeral keys, MFA, certificates.

Linux distributions have been secure for a long time by following these practices. Even their unstable branches. If they can do it, you can do it.

All of this is really about web dev, not s/w dev in general.

npm and pip are curses on the planet.

One point right from the beginning of the article: Why would you EVER leave a public port open straight to phpMyAdmin?

This is what SSH tunneling is for...

> The old operating model was indeed fine in a much smaller, simpler tech world,

The thing with the 'old days' that does not happen now is developers would go out of their way to make sure new releases were API backward compatible. Now it seems anything goes. If the API changed, a new function may be created or the old function would use variable arguments to allow the older functionality.

With that said, providing backward compatibility seems to be hard these days due to a BOM (Bill of material/dependencies) that make a BOM of submarine look simple.

That ssh/xz issue kind of highlighted how complex things have gotten.