Why not? NPM behaves oddly when there is a public package named the same as one on a private repo, in some cases it’ll fetch the public one instead. I believe it’s called package squatting or something. They might have just been showing that this is possible during an assessment. No harm no foul here imo

> They might have just been showing that this is possible during an assessment. No harm no foul here imo

You're not supposed to leave public artifacts or test on public services during an assessment.

It's possible Cursor asked them to do so, but there's no public indication of this either. That's why I qualified my original comment. However, even if they did ask them to, it's typically not appropriate to use a separate unrelated public service (NPM) to perform the demo.

Source: I've done a handful of security assessments of public packaging indices.

Comments here seem to indicate that cursor did NOT ask them to (unless of course someone inside the company did and didn't tell the others)

if Cursor is secure it shouldn't be a problem for them! (and, according to their comments, it is)

It's not about being a problem or not. It's a basic responsibility when doing security research: maintaining an isolated test environment is table stakes.

How should it have been done differently? How else is the researcher supposed to know if the attack works? "Hey random company, we have no proof it's going to work but we think maybe your system, which we can't see, is vulnerable! Go waste time and check!"

Cursor team has already stated here that they did not ask Snyk to perform a security audit. I wonder if Snyk's actions are equivalent to me coming to your house late at night and then trying to open any and all doors and windows. In the name of security research. Without an invitation from you.

How else am I to validate that your house is secure?

I don't think it's like checking the locks in this case... more like adding a landmine in an apartment complex for cursor to trip on maybe ;)

Local DNS override, and two registries. One mirroring the relevant public NPM packages as they are, and one "normal" internal one. Make the mirror registry resolvable with the same name(s) as the real, public NPM registry.

Then test the behaviour.

I think there's an incorrect assumption that the Snyk team has any access to Cursor's systems, or their source code.

"No Harm No Foul" in this case would be a simple demonstrative failure case, not functioning malware.

Out of curiosity- did it work though?

Yeah but this is just the name of the game. How can you even stop SEO style gamification at this point? I’m sure even LLMs are vulnerable/have been trained on SEO bs. End of the day it takes an informed user. Remember back in the day? Don’t trust the internet? I think that mindset will become the main school of thought once again. Which tbh, I think maybe a good thing.

Wow what? Thanks!

Yeah I was thinking while reading this- aren’t they actually allowed to sell that empty seat already since they are allowed to oversell? What do they want to do here? Triple dip?

They would give the seat to any standby, so the airlines are void of sympathy

Also reminds me of amazons cashierless grocery stores

No matter what, tools will be broken. Having access to the source and being able to land a diff to fix the issue is awesome imo.

That’s how open source already works by default. The difference is if an OSS tool is broken my boss doesn’t imply landing a fix is my responsibility on top of my regular job duties.

Working around it is somehow is. A huge part of my work has been plumbing and hacking around limitations in mediocre-at-best OSS tools.

Lots of nonserious companies that take those issues as enough of a reason to move slowly.

Many fewer serious ones where bad tooling is expected to be fixed, smoothed over, or replaced entirely in the interest of future dev time.

> Having access to the source

Yes, thats great.

> being able to land a diff to fix the issue is awesome imo.

yes, if its a one off. but for my last project that would involve spinning up many "XFNs" (multi-team chat fests) to argue that actually they don't want to have that change because of reason x,y and z.

At which point you just give up and make a stupid fucking hack.

So much is not about engineering excellence, its about trying to get people to accept change.

Sounds like https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.07285

Lol the vuln itself is so low bar too- literally just upload a malicious jar file and it execs.

Would the fed doing an emergency cut also further exasperate the spiral as well since this would further devalue the dollar compared to Yen?

I don't think so, because it was already predicted to be likely that the US Fed would lower rates by the time Japan raised theirs. The jobs report from the US sealed it.