search

PSLmodels / OG-USA

Overlapping-generations macroeconomic model for evaluating fiscal policy in the United States
https://pslmodels.github.io/OG-USA/
Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal
19 stars 34 forks source link

Deleted dependency detected #79

Closed ashishbijlani closed 6 months ago

ashishbijlani commented 6 months ago

I'm a Cyber Security researcher and developer of PackjGuard [1] to address open-source software supply chain attacks.

Issue

During my research, I found that this repo is vulnerable to attack due to deleted dependency from the public PyPI registry.

Details

Specifically, file https://github.com/PSLmodels/OG-USA/blob/9da4947cacf412e4930d17365e5419bed5d17df6/setup.py lists xcalc as one of the dependencies. However, it has been deleted from public PyPI. As such, an external bad actor can claim that name and register a malicious package, which will be then installed with pip install command, resulting in arbitrary remote code execution.

Impact

Not only your apps/services using https://github.com/PSLmodels/OG-USA repo code are vulnerable to this attack, but the users of your open-source Github repo could also fall victim.

You could read more about such attacks here: https://medium.com/@alex.birsan/dependency-confusion-4a5d60fec610

Remediation

Please manually register a placeholder xcalc package on PyPI immediately or remove xcalc dependency from https://github.com/PSLmodels/OG-USA/blob/9da4947cacf412e4930d17365e5419bed5d17df6/setup.py to fix this vulnerability.

To automatically fix such issues in future, please install PackjGuard Github app [1].

Thanks!

  1. PackjGuard is a Github app that monitors your repos 24x7, detects vulnerable/malicious/risky open-source dependencies, and creates pull requests for auto remediation: https://github.com/marketplace/packjguard
ashishbijlani commented 6 months ago

Sorry about this false positive.