A potential security risk in the npm ecosystem known as “manifest confusion” has recently been spotlighted in a blog post by Darcy Clarke, a former Staff Engineering Manager at GitHub. Clarke mentioned that JFrog Artifactory seems to replicate this issue, so of course we investigated it right away. In this post, we will explain what the issue is and what it might mean for JFrog Artifactory users.

Modern organizations are constantly striving to gain a competitive advantage by delivering software solutions at a remarkable pace. To achieve this, they heavily rely on open-source software (OSS) libraries and packages, which constitute a significant portion (80-90%) of their software solution. However, while open-source software offers numerous benefits, it also presents potential security challenges.