> But if everyone will be delaying updates, won't be there less chances to catch it in time?
No: the security assumption behind cooldowns rests on security scanning parties, not on innocent users being victimized. Three days is a short cooldown, but it should be a good enough lead for scanning parties.
> I'm not fully sure if it's possible to preventively scan all NPM packages or how much compute it would require.
It’s not that much data, particularly for parties that are directly financially incentivized to be the first to report malware.
I generally try not to name the companies directly, because I don’t want to give them free advertising. But you can look up e.g. the recent Shai Hulud campaign.
> Just post one link of a "supply chain" problem that was prevented by any of these companies before it went into the wild and affected users.
This is not the claim being made, since cooldowns are not widely adopted at the moment.
Well, yeah. There’s no package police that’ll stop you from installing malware. The argument has never revolved around that; the argument is solely that cooldowns are effective if you use them, and timely detection by third parties is strong evidence of that.
I gave Shai Hulud as an example above. If you want precise timeline examples that demonstrate the efficacy of cooldowns, here’s some examples I collected last year[1].
(See the “Window of opportunity” column in the table.)
No: the security assumption behind cooldowns rests on security scanning parties, not on innocent users being victimized. Three days is a short cooldown, but it should be a good enough lead for scanning parties.
> I'm not fully sure if it's possible to preventively scan all NPM packages or how much compute it would require.
It’s not that much data, particularly for parties that are directly financially incentivized to be the first to report malware.