Threats · 95 days ago

Valid Provenance No Longer Proves Package Safety

A signed npm package can still be a trap if the CI/CD pipeline or maintainer account is compromised. The break is not just a bad dependency; the trusted publishing path itself can be used to ship poison that still looks legitimate to verification tools.

Microsoft says 32 @redhat-cloud-services packages were altered across more than 90 versions after attackers used the RedHatInsights/javascript-clients CI/CD pipeline and a legitimate GitHub Actions OIDC publishing workflow. The packages kept authentic provenance signatures, then ran a preinstall hook that stole credentials from developer and CI systems and helped republish more poisoned versions.

That leaves a clean-looking artifact as a live infection point and a persistence channel. Teams that rely on package signatures alone still need to treat the publishing workflow as part of the trust boundary.

Timeline

Sources

13 sources covering this story

Part of the PlainSec briefing for 2026-05-30

Editions

Related stories