Typosquatting, dependency confusion, supply chain attack, call it as you wish

[sinoroc]

Complex topic.

Some random notes from me.

@Tansu.KAYRAK

In the meantime what shall we do to avoid our company network being compromised by a new intern that is unaware of this threat like I was (or even by my own human weaknesses) : block PyPi by our firewall maybe ? setup some whitelisted PyPi packages mechanism ?

Yes, hosting your own server or mirror or proxy is a viable solution:

• Hosting - Python Packaging User Guide

Seems like there are commercial solutions available with curated packages (at least that is what I understood from the descriptions, not endorsement from me):

• https://cloud.google.com/security/products/assured-open-source-software
• Try ActiveState's Open Source Language Automation Platform
• https://www.anaconda.com/

There are some tools you could add to your infrastructure (CI/CD pipelines for example), just to name a few:

• safety · PyPI
• bandit · PyPI

As far as I can tell, the major code forges (GitHub, GitLab) have built-in tools and tooling to warn against potential security issues in your code:

• Code security documentation - GitHub Docs
• Secure your application | GitLab

There is (was) a proposal to strengthen Python packaging ecosystem against “dependency confusion attacks”:

• PEP 708 – Extending the Repository API to Mitigate Dependency Confusion Attacks | peps.python.org
• PEP 708 - Extending the Repository API to Mitigate Dependency Confusion Attacks