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Notes -
Your build workflow should hopefully warn you when you are importing a dependency you did not manually approve of, but to do that it needs to keep track of those (hence the SBOM).
Moreover, it protects you from (some) mistakes made upstream. That lone overworked dev whose work on a library is pivotal to many other projects making a typo and importing a backdoored library is now going to be triggering alerts for downstream projects.
Any serious shop is already reviewing code changes, so the original bogus import should already be reviewed and I don't see this as additional protection. I guess it offers some protection if (as the other commenter suggested) packages with very few users are specially flagged during review. But merely flagging the addition of a new library is not useful, nobody is going to be chasing down new libraries in each code review to see if they are legit or not.
This is a good point, though it doesn't cover the novel library case. It relies on having a list of backdoored libraries to reference, but such libraries could simply be removed from the package manager altogether. Otherwise, I guarantee nobody is going to review the complete transitive dependency list for new slopsquatted libraries, ever.
At least in my shop, the workflow has been to generate a spreadsheet with alphabetized dependencies, marked by version and environment, across all projects, and leads review them once a month. Yes, for internal development this is all stuff that's getting looked over anyway during normal PRs, but a second set of review's not always a bad thing. For external tools, or dependency-of-dependency issues, or where an old library is getting increasingly out-of-date, it can be a first impression matter, and that has highlighted some concerns or vulnerabilities that weren't visible without delving deep into log files.
((That said, b/c we have some python situations, it's also had 'semver, damn near killed him' sorta problems where a 'bugfix' update also broke everything subtly. And a larger number of cases where 'this second library looks like a typo of the first library' that was just QT being QT.))
I've been trying to figure out a way to automate date-of-update fields for at least some of those dependencies, but it's ... been kinda a pain in the ass. I dunno if commercial SBOM tools do that. Most of the ones I've looked at only advertise highlighting 'known risk' versions and 'known good' ones, which I'm less a fan of. It's not fun and it's not hugely effective even at small scales -- I can't really do much more than google a lot of dependencies for server tools, since we're a pretty small shop and that's far out of my field of experience -- but it's not just box-checking either.
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