Dependency Confusion: How I Hacked Into Apple, Microsoft and Dozens of Other Companies

The Story of a Novel Supply Chain Attack

Ever since I started learning how to code, I have been fascinated by the level of trust we put in a simple command like this one:

pip install package_name

Some programming languages, like Python, come with an easy, more or less official method of installing dependencies for your projects. These installers are usually tied to public code repositories where anyone can freely upload code packages for others to use.

You have probably heard of these tools already — Node has npm and the npm registry, Python’s pip uses PyPI (Python Package Index), and Ruby’s gems can be found on… well, RubyGems.

When downloading and using a package from any of these sources, you are essentially trusting its publisher to run code on your machine. So can this blind trust be exploited by malicious actors?

Of course it can.

None of the package hosting services can ever guarantee that all the code its users upload is malware-free. Past research has shown that typosquatting — an attack leveraging typo’d versions of popular package names — can be incredibly effective in gaining access to random PCs across the world.

Other well-known dependency chain attack paths include using various methods to compromise existing packages, or uploading malicious code under the names of dependencies that no longer exist.

The Idea

While attempting to hack PayPal with me during the summer of 2020, Justin Gardner (@Rhynorater) shared an interesting bit of Node.js source code found on GitHub.

The code was meant for internal PayPal use, and, in its package.json file, appeared to contain a mix of public and private dependencies — public packages from npm, as well as…