Re:NPM debug and chalk packages compromised
by veber-alex on Monday September 08, 2025 @05:32PM
(#45174292)
AI based code review with escalation to a human
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:NPM debug and chalk packages compromised
by Yoric on Monday September 08, 2025 @06:17PM
(#45174765)
I'm curious :)
Does the AI detect the obfuscation?
Re:NPM debug and chalk packages compromised
by justusthane on Monday September 08, 2025 @06:37PM
(#45175006)
Probably. It’s trivial to plug some obfuscated code into an LLM and ask it what it does.
Re:NPM debug and chalk packages compromised
by spartanatreyu on Monday September 08, 2025 @07:24PM
(#45175437)
Yeah, but just imagine how many false positives and false negatives there would be...
Re:NPM debug and chalk packages compromised
by 33a on Monday September 08, 2025 @09:27PM
(#45176325)
It's actually pretty easy to detect that something is obfuscated, but it's harder to prove that the obfuscated code is actually harmful. This is why we still have a team of humans review flagged packages before we try to get them taken down, otherwise you would end up with way too many false positives.
Re:NPM debug and chalk packages compromised
by Yoric on Tuesday September 09, 2025 @01:44AM
(#45177854)
Yeah, what I meant is that obfuscation is a strong sign that something needs to be flagged for review. Sadly, there's only a thin line between obfuscation and minification, so I was wondering how many false positives you get.
Thanks for the links in your other comment, I'll take a look!
Re:NPM debug and chalk packages compromised
by nurettin on Monday September 15, 2025 @12:22AM
(#45246094)
I think that would be static analysis. After processing the source code normally (looking for net & sys calls), you decode base64, concatenate all strings and process again (until decode makes no change)