A curated list of awesome Node.js Security resources.

# # #

liran_tal

List inspired by the awesome list thing.


Contents

Tools

Web Framework Hardening

  • Helmet - Helmet helps you secure your Express apps by setting various HTTP headers.
  • koa-helmet - koa-helmet helps you secure your Koa apps by setting various HTTP headers.
  • blankie - CSP plugin for hapi.
  • fastify-helmet - fastify-helmet helps you secure your fastify apps by setting important secutiry headers.
  • nuxt-security - 🛡 Security Module for Nuxt based on OWASP Top 10 and Helmet.

Static Code Analysis

  • eslint-plugin-security - ESLint rules for Node Security. This project will help identify potential security hotspots, but finds a lot of false positives which need triage by a human.
  • tslint-plugin-security - TSLint rules for Node Security. This project will help identify potential security hotspots, but finds a lot of false positives which need triage by a human.
  • safe-regex - detect potentially catastrophic exponential-time regular expressions by limiting the star height to 1.
  • vuln-regex-detector - This module lets you check a regex for vulnerability. In JavaScript, regular expressions (regexes) can be "vulnerable": susceptible to catastrophic backtracking. If your application is used on the client side, this can be a performance issue. On the server side, this can expose you to Regular Expression Denial of Service (REDOS).
  • git-secrets - Prevents you from committing secrets and credentials into git repositories.
  • DevSkim - DevSkim is a set of IDE plugins and rules that provide security "linting" capabilities. Also has support for CLI so it can be integrated into CI/CD pipeline.
  • ban-sensitive-files - Checks filenames to be committed against a library of filename rules to prevent storing sensitive files in Git. Checks some files for sensitive contents (for example authToken inside .npmrc file).
  • NodeJSScan - A static security code scanner for Node.js applications. Including neat UI that can point where the issue is and how to fix it.
  • Nsecure - Node.js CLI that allow you to deeply analyze the dependency tree of a given npm package or a directory.
  • Trust But Verify - TBV compares an npm package with its source repository to ensure the resulting artifact is the same.
  • lockfile-lint - lint lockfiles for improved security and trust policies to keep clean from malicious package injection and other insecure configurations.
  • pkgsign - A CLI tool for signing and verifying npm and yarn packages.
  • semgrep - Open-source, offline, easy-to-customize static analysis for many languages. Some others on this list (NodeJSScan) use semgrep as their engine.
  • npm-scan - An extensible, heuristic-based vulnerability scanning tool for installed npm packages.
  • js-x-ray - JavaScript and Node.js SAST scanner capable of detecting various well-known malicious code patterns (Unsafe import, Unsafe stmt, Unsafe RegEx, encoded literals, minified and obfuscated codes).
  • cspscanner - CSP Scanner helps developers and security experts to easily inspect and evaluate a site’s Content Security (CSP).
  • eslint-plugin-anti-trojan-source - ESLint plugin to detect and prevent Trojan Source attacks from entering your codebase.
  • sdc-check - Small tool to inform you about potential risks in your project dependencies list
  • fix-lockfile-integrity - A CLI tool to fix weak integrity hash (sha1) to a more secure integrity hash (sha512) in your npm lockfile.

Dynamic Application Security Testing

  • PurpleTeam - A security regression testing SaaS and CLI, perfect for inserting into your build pipelines. You don’t need to write any tests yourself. purpleteam is smart enough to know how to test, you just need to provide a Job file which tells purpleteam what you want tested.

Input Validation & Output Encoding

  • node-esapi - node-esapi is a minimal port of the ESAPI4JS (Enterprise Security API for JavaScript) encoder.
  • escape-html - Escape string for use in HTML.
  • js-string-escape - Escape any string to be a valid JavaScript string literal between double quotes or single quotes.
  • validator - An npm library of string validators and sanitizers.
  • xss-filters - Just sufficient output filtering to prevent XSS!
  • DOMPurify - a DOM-only, super-fast, uber-tolerant XSS sanitizer for HTML, MathML and SVG.
  • envalid - Envalid is a small library for validating and accessing environment variables in Node.js.

Secure Composition

CSRF

Vulnerabilities and Security Advisories

  • npq - Safely install packages with npm or yarn by auditing them as part of your install process.
  • snyk - Snyk helps you find, fix and monitor known vulnerabilities in Node.js npm, Ruby and Java dependencies, both on an ad hoc basis and as part of your CI (Build) system.
  • node-release-lines - Introspection API for Node.js release metadata. Provides information about release lines, their relative status along with details of each release.
  • auditjs - Audits an NPM package.json file to identify known vulnerabilities using the OSSIndex.
  • npm-audit - Runs a security audit based on your package.json using npm.
  • npm-audit-resolver - Manage npm-audit results, including options to ignore specific issues in clear and auditable way.
  • gammaray - Runs a security audit based on your package.json using the Node.js Security Working Group vulnerability data.
  • patch-package - Allows app authors to create fixes for npm dependencies (in node_modules) without forking or waiting for merged PRs, by creating and applying patches.
  • check-my-headers - Fast and simple way to check any HTTP Headers.
  • is-website-vulnerable - finds publicly known security vulnerabilities in a website's frontend JavaScript libraries.
  • joi-security - Detect security flaws in Joi validation schemas.
  • confused - Tool to check for dependency confusion vulnerabilities in multiple package management systems. See Dependency Confusion: How I Hacked Into Apple, Microsoft and Dozens of Other Companies for reference on the reasoning for this tool.

Security Hardening

  • hijagger - Checks all maintainers of all npm and PyPI packages for hijackable packages through domain re-registration.
  • snync - Mitigate security concerns of Dependency Confusion supply chain security risks.
  • NopPP - No Prototype Pollution - Tiny helper to protect against Prototype Pollution vulnerabilities in your application regardless if they introduced in your own code or in 3rd-party code.
  • anti-trojan-source - Detect trojan source attacks that employ unicode bidi attacks to inject malicious code.
  • express-limiter - Rate limiting middleware for Express applications built on redis.
  • limits - Simple express/connect middleware to set limit to upload size, set request timeout etc.
  • rate-limiter-flexible - Fast, flexible and friendly rate limiter by key and protection from DDoS and brute force attacks in process Memory, Cluster, Redis, MongoDb, MySQL, PostgreSQL at any scale. Express and Koa examples included.
  • tor-detect-middleware Tor detect middleware for express
  • express-enforces-ssl Enforces SSL for Express based Node.js projects. It is however highly advised that you handle SSL and global HTTP rules in a front proxy.
  • bourne JSON.parse() drop-in replacement with prototype poisoning protection.
  • fastify-rate-limit A low overhead rate limiter for your routes.
  • secure-json-parse JSON.parse() drop-in replacement with prototype poisoning protection.
  • express-brute A brute-force protection middleware for express routes that rate-limits incoming requests, increasing the delay with each request in a fibonacci-like sequence.
  • allowed-scripts Execute allowed npm install lifecycle scripts.

Security Incidents

Protestware supply chain security issues

The following is a list of known protestware spanning across other ecosystems too:

Articles covering the topics around protestware are:

npm and JavsScript specific security incidents and supply chain security issues

Collection of security incidents that happened in the Node.js, JavaScript and npm related communities with supporting articles:

Date Name Reference Links
2023 Feb 16 Researchers Hijack Popular NPM Package with Millions of Downloads Illustria on The Hacker News
2023 Feb 10 Researchers Uncover Obfuscated Malicious Code in PyPI Python Packages, affiliated npm ecosystem evidence too The Hacker News
2023 Jan 29 Phylum Identifies 137 Malicious npm Packages phylum
2022 Nov 29 Invisible npm malware may hide in crafted versions and bypass npm audit's security checks JFrog
2022 Nov 24 Phylum team captures captures malicious npm package imagecompress-mini claims to be an image compress tool Louisw Lang on Twitter
2022 Oct 12 Aqua security discovers flaw in npm that allows disclosing of privately hosted npm packages on the registry Aqua
2022 Oct 07 LofyGang Distributed ~200 Malicious NPM Packages to Steal Credit Card Data TheHackerNews
2022 Sep 23 Popular Cryptocurrency Exchange dYdX Has Had Its NPM Account Hacked Mend
2022 Jul 29 malicious packages small-sm, pern-valids, lifeculer, and proc-title target stealing credit card information and discord tokens darkreading
2022 May 26 stolen oAuth GitHub tokens lead to npm security breach, compromised user accounts metadata, private packages, and plain-text passwords in logs GitHub
2022 May 24 malicious npm packages exploiting dependency confusion attacks Snyk, Snyk
2022 May 23 npm packages hijacked due to expired domains TheRegister
2022 April 05 New npm Flaws Let Attackers Better Target Packages for Account Takeover Aqua
2022 April 26 npm package planting Aqua, The Hacker News
2022 March 31 More protestware from styled-components Checkmarx Security blog
2022 March 18 More protestware from es5-ext and event-source-pollyfill Snyk advisory for event-source-pollyfill, es5-ext commit, ArsTechnica
2022 March 16 peacenotwar module sabotages npm developers in the node-ipc package to protest the invasion of Ukraine Snyk blog, Darkreading, SC Magazine
2022 March 7 Malicious packages caught exfiltrating data via legit webhook services Checkmarx Security blog
2022 February 22 25 Malicious JavaScript Libraries due to typosquatting attacks TheHackerNews
2022 February 11 2,818 npm accounts use email addresses with expired domains TheRecord
2021 December 08 17 JavaScript libraries contained malicious code to collect and steal Discord access tokens and environment variables from users’ computers - TheRecord
2021 November 04 coa and rc packages - Popular npm library 'coa' was hijacked today with malicious code injected into it, ephemerally impacting React pipelines around the world Bleepingcomputer, the record, npm tweet, npm tweet for rc.
2021 October 27 noblox.js-proxy and noblox.js - typosquatted npm package that target users of official roblox API and SDK npm package (noblox.js) the register
2021 October 22 ua-parser-js - Versions of a popular NPM package named ua-parser-js was found to contain malicious code Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), github issue, IOCs, portswigger, theregister
2021 September 02 pac-resolver - can enable threat actors on the local network to run arbitrary code within your Node.js process whenever it attempts to make an HTTP request arstechnica.com
2021 August 07 npm package ownership process firing back and exposing potential vectors for supply chain security risks. Twitter
2021 April 13 New Linux, macOS malware hidden in fake Browserify NPM package: web-browserify Bleepingcomputer.
2020 December 02 jdb.js - db-json.js - malicious npm packages caught installing remote access trojans. zdnet.com, Bleepingcomputer.
2020 November 09 discord malicious npm package - Npm package caught stealing sensitive Discord and browser files sonatype, zdnet.
2020 November 03 twilio-npm - malicious npm package opens backdoors on programmers' computers. zdnet
2020 August 29 fallguys - malicious package stealing sensitive files. zdnet
2020 April 27 is-promise - one-liner library breaks an ecosystem. Forbes Lindesay - Maintainer post-mortem, snyk's postmortem
2019 August 22 bb-builder - malicious package targeting Windows systems to exfiltrate information and send to a remote service. Snyk, Reversing Labs, Bleeping Computer
2019 June 05 EasyDEX-GUI - malicious code found in npm package event-stream. npm, snyk, komodo announcement
2018 November 27 event-stream - malicious code found in npm package event-stream. github issue snyk, snyk's postmortem, schneid, intrinsic, npm, jayden, hillel wayne's postmortem
2018 July 12 eslint - malicious packages found in npm package eslint-scope and eslint-config-eslint. github issue, eslint tweet, eslint's postmortem, nodesource's postmortem, npm's statement
2018 May 02 getcookies - malicious package getcookies gets embedded in higher-level express related packages. GitHub issue, npm, bleepingcomputer.com, Snyk’s getcookies vulnerability page, Hacker News
2018 Feb 13 maintainer account with access to conventional-changelog npm package compromised and published malware for 1 day and 11 hours conventional-changelog repository update
2017 August 02 crossenv - malicious typosquatting package crossenv steals environment variables. CJ blog on typosquat packages, Typosquatting research paper, bleepingcomputer.com, Snyk’s crossenv vulnerability page, Hacker News
2016 March 22 left-pad - how one developer broke Node, Babel and thousands of projects in 11 lines of JavaScript. left-pad.io, The Register, qurtaz.

Follow-up notes:

  • A resource for malicious incidents is BadJS - a repository of malicious JavaScript that has been found in websites, extensions, npm packages, and anywhere else JavaScript lives.
  • npm zoo is an archive keeping track of the original malicious packages source code for educational purposes.

Educational

Hacking Playground

  • OWASP NodeGoat - The OWASP NodeGoat project provides an environment to learn how OWASP Top 10 security risks apply to web applications developed using Node.js and how to effectively address them.
  • OWASP Juice Shop - The OWASP Juice Shop is an intentionally insecure webapp for security trainings written entirely in Javascript which encompasses the entire OWASP Top Ten and other severe security flaws.
  • DomGoat - Client XSS happens when untrusted data from sources ends up in sinks. Information and excercises on different sources, different sinks and example of XSS occuring due to them in the menu on the left-hand side.

Articles

Research Papers

Books

Roadmaps

Companies

  • Snyk - A developer-first solution that automates finding & fixing vulnerabilities in your dependencies.
  • Sqreen - Automated security for your web apps - real time application security protection.
  • NodeSource - Mission-critical Node.js applications. Provides N|Solid and Node Certified Modules.
  • GuardRails - A GitHub App that gives you instant security feedback in your Pull Requests.
  • NodeSecure - An organization of developers building free and open source JavaScript/Node.js security tools.

Contributing

Found an awesome project, package, article, other type of resources related to Node.js Security? Send me a pull request! Just follow the guidelines. Thank you!


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License

CC0