450
Bitwarden CLI distributed through NPM has been compromised. Bitwarden Statement on Checkmarx Supply Chain Incident.
(community.bitwarden.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2026
450 points (99.6% liked)
Selfhosted
58725 readers
820 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
-
No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Can we stop using npm now?
I swear to god the number of attacks like this or spawned from other attacks like this is fucking stupid. I’ve gender seen anything like it.
Npm probably has the biggest attack surface and many of the libraries hosted there are in extremely widespread use. They've taken some steps to mitigate these supply chain attacks, but as we've seen with more recent examples, it's unrealistic to think they can be prevented completely. Most of these attacks use stolen developer credentials, which invalidates almost all potential security measures on the registry side and the best you can hope for is catching a malicious package quickly. To be clear: I think the JS ecosystem is uniquely positioned to be the prime target of supply chain attacks and while that doesn't excuse the slow implementation of security measures from the npm team, the people arguing that other package managers and registries aren't vulnerable to this have to be huffing fumes.
That’s fair, I won’t pretend pypi/pip and running uvx is much safer than npx.
But why hasn’t JavaScript established a defacto stdlib to replace ask the left pads and is even type packages?
I’ve taken a near zero dependency policy on my personal projects regardless, and now I run most code in containers to sandbox it.
As someone completely unfamiliar with the JavaScript mess, are these security issues specific to npm the actual repository or npm the package manager?
If it's the latter, does using something else like yarn or bun instead help?
It's not, it's a problem of every package manager that do not use sources and checksums, like rust and python. Take a look at this article that does a better job then me at explaining the situation.
Given that he lied about the results of the analysis he is using to prove his point, I find it hard to trust anything in this article.
In the analysis, Harvey said only 8 repositories did not match their upstream repos. The other problems were issues like not including the VCS info, squashing history, etc.
EDIT: Also, I just noticed that he called it a "recent" analysis. It's roughly a two year old analysis. I expect things have improved a bit since then, especially since part of the problem was packaging using older versions of Cargo.
Lmfao
Competent standard lib + decentralized libs + checksum db.
While the article is a bit theatralic, it offers important arguments.
I think npm allows installation scripts which do make this worse, as a package can run arbitrary command at install time.
Npm has gotten a few config options that prevent this behaviour. We can only hope that they will become the default eventually.
This problem has nothing to do with NPM. Checkmarx was compromised last month, and during that compromise there were malicious VS Code extensions published to Visual Studio Code Marketplace. A Bitwarden developer says that somebody ran one of those malicious extensions, and GitHub API keys were stolen which were used in publishing the malicious CLI package.
It's probably better that it happened on NPM. If the CLI were only downloadable from the Bitwarden website, it would have likely taken longer for somebody to notice something was wrong.
Yes, but NPM has been had countless security problems, this isn't a new problem. Even tho this instance is not a problem of NPM itself, it still has been proven as one of the most unreliable and insecure package managers out there.
I'm not a particular fan of npm, but you'll probably see this kind of thing with any package manager of similar size. More a matter of what's the most attractive target than the package tech itself.
But why does NPM enable post install scripts by default? Why is there no way to define a minimum release age for dependency versions? It’s just poor design choices.
What a fucking asanine series of events.
Genuine question. How is NPM more vulnerable than other repos? Haven't similar supply chain attacks succeeded at least as well as this one through GitHub itself and even Linux package repos?
Larger standard libraries do a lot. It's a lot harder to sneak vulnerabilities into the basic C# or Java or C++ libraries than it is to add a vulnerability to something one dude maintains in the javascript ecosystem.
And since javascript libraries tend to be so small and focused, it's become standard practice for even other libraries to pull in as many of those as they want.
And it stacks. Your libraries pull in other libraries which can pull in their own libraries. I had a project recently where I had maybe a dozen direct dependencies and they ended up pulling in 1,311 total libraries, largely all maintained by different people.
In a more sane ecosystem like C#, all the basics like string manipulation, email, or logging have libraries provided by Microsoft that have oversight when they're changed. There can be better, third-party libraries for these things (log4net is pretty great), but they have to compete with their reputation and value over the standard library, which tends to be a high bar. And libraries made on top of that system are generally pulling all those same, certified standard libraries. So you pull in 3 libraries and only one of those pulls in another third party single library. And you end up with 4 total third party libraries.
Javascript just doesn't really have a certified standard library.
(This certified standard library doesn't have to be proprietary. Microsoft has made C# open source, and Linus Torvalds with the Linux Kernel Organization holds ultimate responsibility for the Linux kernel.)
I will almost always choose .NET as my development platform when greenfielding a project for exactly this reason. It's an incredibly robust standard library that virtually guarantees I won't need to pull in a litany of additional utility libraries, and I can also expect that what libraries I do choose to bring in are highly unlikely to drag along a ridiculous parade of dependencies.
Do you feel its still worth learning now?
Probably more worth than it was 15 years ago since you're no longer restricted to Windows and it's now open source. I've heard a lot of people say it's nicer than Spring for enterprise stuff. Haven't tried it much myself though. Was fairly easy to set up a simple API, but I then got distracted by other projects.
Lol, LMAO even
Left-pad tho
Part of the problem is also how many packages people bring in, even for the simplest of things.
I don't think you'll find another major repo with so many real-world incidents though. Whether this is because of a systemic problem or just because it's targeted more frequently, I'm not sure.
As much as some people deride it Javascript is one of the most used languages on the planet.
This is basically the same as people thinking windows is less secure because it's more often targeted.
JavaScript does have a bit of a problem with dependencies but it isn't much different than other languages with built in package managers like rust. It's just a bigger juicer target.
But Windows is less secure. Two things can be true at once. They are in the original topic too.
The Java ecosystem is massive and decades old and I don't hear one iota of the shit about maven central that I hear about npm.
I guarantee that npm is full up with vibe coded bullshit at this point as well.
I'm not sure what it even takes to upload a package to npm. Not even a pulse. I honestly never looked into it because the whole ecosystem is so rancid.
EDIT: Look at how many shits in this are optional (and note the overall quality of the article as well): https://dev.to/aneshodza/publishing-your-first-npm-library-51k2. The ecosystem sucks.
There's a lot of features that make it a better package manager but nobody cares. Every project has hundreds of dependencies and packages use a minimum, not exact, version.
That sounds more like bad practices from the community. It definitely has ways to use exact versions. Not the least of which the lock file. Or the shrinkwrap file which public packages should be using.
Any security system based on expecting good behavior from people is sure to fail. If NPM has no estructural features to enforce safe behaviors, it is vulnerable by default. As no person using it will apply safe practices unless forced to. Specially if the default, easiest, less friction behavior, is inherently unsafe.
I wouldn't say pulling in higher versions is unsafe unless an attack like this succeeds. Otherwise it's only an annoyance.
Then you're waiting forever on vulnerability patches. Especially if there are layers, and each layer waits to update.