Over 1,500 npm packages exposed by Trusted Publishing validation flaw

Summary

Bloom Security researchers found a flaw in npm's Trusted Publishing, dubbed SlugFest, that let attackers publish under legitimate packages by reclaiming abandoned GitHub repository names. npm trusted the repository's owner/repository name rather than its immutable numeric ID, and the researchers identified more than 1,500 potentially vulnerable packages with over 10 million combined downloads. The attack did not require stealing the maintainer's credentials.

Mitigation

The npm team shipped a fix on October 2 introducing a 48-hour expiry for unvalidated Trusted Publishing configurations. npm also rejects trusted-publishing tokens issued through GitHub Actions' issue_comment events, alongside the existing restriction on pull_request_target events. Bloom recommends that maintainers audit their Trusted Publishing configurations.

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