Simon Willison’s Weblog

10th February 2021 - Link Blog

Dependency Confusion: How I Hacked Into Apple, Microsoft and Dozens of Other Companies (via) Alex Birsan describes a new category of security vulnerability he discovered in the npm, pip and gem packaging ecosystems: if a company uses a private repository with internal package names, uploading a package with the same name to the public repository can often result in an attacker being able to execute their own code inside the networks of their target. Alex scored over $130,000 in bug bounties from this one, from a number of name-brand companies. Of particular note for Python developers: the --extra-index-url argument to pip will consult both public and private registries and install the package with the highest version number!