Dependency Confusion: How Attackers Poison Your Build

Modern applications heavily rely on open-source code, with estimates suggesting that 70-90% of an application's code comes from such sources, making them vulnerable to attacks on their dependency trees. These attacks exploit the trust and automation of package managers and include methods like dependency confusion, typosquatting, combosquatting, and package poisoning. Dependency confusion involves an attacker publishing a public package with the same name as a company's private package, leading the build system to mistakenly pull the public one due to its higher version number. Typosquatting and combosquatting prey on human error by using names similar to popular packages, while package poisoning involves injecting malicious code into trusted packages through compromised maintainer accounts. To mitigate these risks, developers are advised to reserve package names, use scoped namespaces, pin private registry sources, commit lockfiles with version pinning, keep internal package names private, and employ real-time malware detection systems to identify and block threats.

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