Security of the upstream code, and, the importance of the egress firewall

We talked earlier about languages and tools like Go, Python, Docker, Nodejs, that directly import, live, their upstream. And my shock on deploying a SAST tool. Here’s a concrete example. A python package was modified on PyPi. It was reported (as below), showing how this is just on PyPi, not on github (side note: do you sign your git commits? If not, why not?). You can see that this code is taking your ssh password, username, etc, and posting it to someone else’s server. Generally, not what you want.

Now, here’s the rub. Would you be able to detect if this had happened to you in the past? Would you be able to block it from happening now? To do so you would need an egress firewall. One with all the coordinates of things logged (and if you use NAT or proxies, both sides of the coordinates so you could track it back).

I bet you don’t have that egress (or east-west) firewall do you?

Are you the master of your own egress?

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One response to “Security of the upstream code, and, the importance of the egress firewall”

  1. Rob Wise

    After an incident involving deserialisation in some third party code I started blocking certain well known ports on egress from my servers.

    The ongoing maintenance required to change from default allow on egress to default block seemed excessive. Certainly more work than was proportional to the size of my hat 😉

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