Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Choosing a Node.js Docker image may seem like a small thing, but image sizes and potential vulnerabilities can have dramatic effects on your CI/CD pipeline and security posture. So, how do you choose the best Node.js Docker image? It can be easy to miss the potential risks of using FROM node:latest, or just FROM node(which is an alias for the former). This is even more true if you’re unaware of the overall security risks and sheer file size they introduce to a CI/CD pipeline.

On September 11th, 2022, Snyk published a vulnerability report for the popular CSRF token management csurf npm package. The vulnerability impacts all known versions, which are currently yielding more than 400,000 downloads per week. The vulnerability report is based on the public disclosure by security consultant Adrian Tiron and their write-up on the Fortbridge blog.

Technology is always changing and your processes and practices need to keep up with those changes. So while npm is 12 years old, your practices around npm package creation should hopefully be a lot more modern. If you have a feeling they may be a little out of date, though, keep reading.

Recently, there have been some remote code execution (RCE) attacks that included just a single line of well-built code that can run a remote shell. Let’s take a look at why and how these attacks work, why npm is particularly susceptible, what could happen if they get into machines, and how to detect and fix them.

Mend Supply Chain Defender reported and blocked dozens of packages from the same author. These packages targeted developers of many companies and frameworks like slack, Cloudflare, Datadog, Metamask, react, Shopify, OpenSea, Angular and more. A dependency confusion attack takes advantage of a software developer’s tendency to pull malicious code from public repositories rather than internal ones.

Two packages of well-known origin were found exfiltrating Windows SAM and SYSTEM files, apparently as part of internal security research rather than a targeted dependency confusion attack. On June 6th, 2022, the Mend research team used Supply Chain Defender to detect and flag two malicious packages from the same author that contained identical code. We alerted npm and the packages were removed within three hours of publication.

Great things happen when the academic world and the software industry work together! Today, we’d like to share a story about our recent collaboration with the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, a big science institution in Germany. Back in January, Cris Staicu Ph.D. (Tenure-Track Faculty, CISPA), contacted us about his research on NodeJS and JavaScript.