In my last blog post about typosquatting package managers I discussed my findings about attacking the programming language package managers from rubygems.org, PyPi and npmjs.com.

This blog contribution generated quite some interest and people subsequently asked themselves whether other package managers might also be vulnerable to this hybrid attack (typosquatting involves a technical and psychological attack vector). During the time I wrote my thesis, I encountered some other package managers. A very good overview of some of the most recent package managers gives the github showcase page about package managers which is summarized in the table below:

Package Manager Name # of Stars on Github
bower/bower 14257
VundleVim/Vundle.vim 11969
npm/npm 9664
alcatraz/Alcatraz 8936
CocoaPods/CocoaPods 8115
composer/composer 7909
Carthage/Carthage 7160
jordansissel/fpm 6722
componentjs/component 4503
apple/swift-package-manager 4318
wbond/package_control 3018
pypa/pip 2911
chocolatey/chocolatey 2741
Masterminds/glide 2163
tmux-plugins/tpm 1961
Homebrew/brew 1757
rust-lang/cargo 1705
rubygems/rubygems 1547
caolan/jam 1540
volojs/volo 1326
gpmgo/gopm 1027
spmjs/spm 882
atom/apm 690
freshshell/fresh 674
ruslo/hunter 436
ocaml/opam 425
NuGet/Home 367

The obvious question now is: How many of those package managers …


Continue reading