WORKING DOC
Authors:
- Samuli Kuusela
- Bob Heinemann
Purpose:
The purpose of this investigation to understand ONAP's current security posture regarding dependency management. If found to be lacking, recommendations will be made to enhance.
Notes from Samuli
The novel types of dependency confusion attacks utilize the way some package managers work (by default). In this case, “A dependency confusion attack or supply chain substitution attack occurs when a software installer script is tricked into pulling a malicious code file from a public repository instead of the intended file of the same name from an internal repository”. Quote from dependency confusion attacks, I recommend you read that very short article.
So my question is, if ONAP SW build process can be improved wrt. this types of attack.
Quote from the same article:
Microsoft’s whitepaper details three ways to mitigate the risk of a substitution attack:
- Only use a single private package feed – pull any dependent public packages into your private repository so you can be sure of control. However, this does then mean you need to manually update the public package versions as needed.
- Control the scope – if your package manager supports scope control (like npm does) you can prevent internal packages from being retrieved from a public repository.
- Client side verification – integrity verification, when enabled in the package manager, will abort the build if an unexpected change is detected in a dependent file.