Trail of Bits

Audit of 25 Package Managers Shows Only Two Verify Every Package's Integrity Against Compromised Repositories

A comprehensive test by Trail of Bits examined 25 popular package managers to determine whether they detect malicious code substituted by a compromised repository. The study found that fewer than half verify package integrity by default using lockfiles, and only two managers check the cryptographic hash of every downloaded package. Most managers either require manual configuration, use hashes insecurely, or lack any integrity checks even when lockfiles are present. Signature verification is even rarer, with only Go performing checks by default. The research used a Docker and mitmproxy testbed to simulate attacks while preserving realistic conditions. Results highlight significant gaps in supply-chain protections across ecosystems including JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Rust, and others. The findings also discuss limitations of current lockfile designs and emerging improvements in several communities.

WhatsApp Begins Limited Beta Testing of On-Device Scam Alert to Detect Fraud While Preserving End-to-End Encryption

WhatsApp has started limited beta testing of its Scam Alert feature, which uses an on-device machine learning model to analyze message patterns and linguistic indicators of fraud. The system runs entirely locally on the user's smartphone, ensuring that conversation content is never sent to WhatsApp or Meta. Users receive warnings about suspicious messages from unknown contacts and can choose to block, report, ignore, or mark the chat as trusted. To maintain transparency, each model release is logged in an immutable journal managed by Cloudflare with Ed25519 signatures and SHA-256 hashes. The company receives only anonymized statistics on detections and user actions. In parallel, Signal has introduced automatic key verification using a cryptographically verifiable log audited by Cloudflare and Trail of Bits.