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this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2024
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I don't know much about NPM (having avoided JS as much as possible for my entire life), but golang seems to have a good solution: 'vendoring'. One can choose to lock all external dependencies to local snapshots brought into a project, with no automatic updating, but with the option to manually update them when desired.
NPM has that as well. In fact most languages and build tools support that. It's actually rare to not have support for that these days.
Ah, good. I wonder why it isn't used more often -- this wouldn't be such a huge problem then I would hope. (Let me guess -- 'convenience', the archenemy of security.)
Because it doesn’t really solve much. After every update of external libraries, do you go through all the diffs to see if there is malicious code? Of course you don’t. And even if you would, it’s not even always possible to spot it. So all locking packages does is postpone the problem to when you eventually update. As an added bonus, you’re now vulnerable to all the legitimate issues that get fixed in those updates you’re not installing regularly.