TH30110
Detected presence of software components with remotely hosted binary dependencies.
| priority | CI/CD status | severity | effort | SAFE level | SAFE assessment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | pass | medium | high | None | None |
About the issue
Software developers use programming and design knowledge to build reusable software components. Software components are the basic building blocks for modern applications. Software consumed by an enterprise consists of hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of open source components. Each of these components can have dozens, or even hundreds, of its own dependencies. When building applications, software developers download and install components from public repositories. For components to work properly, all of their dependencies also need to be installed. Some package repositories, like Node Package Manager (NPM), allow components to declare dependencies that are hosted remotely. Such dependencies are automatically downloaded from a specified location during software component installation. Since remotely hosted dependencies are not immutable, that enables a threat actor to change the dependency contents even after a component was published and vetted by security solutions. It is uncommon to find open source components that use remotely hosted binary dependencies.
How to resolve the issue
- Review software component remote dependency locations.
- If the software component resolves dependencies from unusual locations, investigate the build and release environment for software supply chain compromise.
- Consider vendoring the software component with all of its dependencies.
- Avoid using this software package until it is vetted as safe.
Incidence statistics
ReversingLabs periodically collects and analyzes the contents of popular software package repositories for threat research purposes. Analysis results are used to calculate incidence statistics for issues (policy violations) that Spectra Assure can detect in software packages.
This section is updated when new data becomes available.
Total amount of packages analyzed
- RubyGems: 183K
- Nuget: 644K
- PyPi: 628K
- NPM: 3.72M