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'REVIVAL HIJACK' ON PYPI DISGUISES MALWARE WITH LEGITIMATE FILE NAMES'REVIVAL
HIJACK' ON PYPI DISGUISES MALWARE WITH LEGITIMATE FILE NAMES

Adversaries reusing abandoned package names sneak malware into organizations in
a sort of software shell game.

Jai Vijayan, Contributing Writer

September 4, 2024

4 Min Read
Source: Zakharchuk via Shutterstock


Security researchers have discovered a simple and troubling way for attackers to
distribute malicious payloads via the PyPI package repository.

All that the technique involves is re-registering a malicious package on PyPI
using the same name as any legitimate, previously registered but now removed
package from the repository and then waiting for organizations to download it.
Since PyPI does not prohibit the reuse of names of removed packages, it's easy
for adversaries to pass off rogue packages that once were available on the
registry as legitimate ones.


REVIVAL HIJACK

"The 'Revival Hijack' method can be used by attackers as an easy supply chain
attack, targeting organizations and infiltrating a wide variety of
environments," researchers at JFrog warned in a report this week. "PyPI users
should stay vigilant and make sure their CI/CD machines are not trying to
install packages that were already removed from PyPI," they noted, after
recently discovering a threat actor using the tactic in an apparent attempt to
distribute malware.

The attack method that JFrog discovered is one of several that adversaries have
used in recent years to try and sneak malware into enterprise environments via
public code repositories such as PyPI, npm, Maven Central, NuGet, and RubyGems.
Common tactics have included cloning and infecting popular repositories,
poisoning artifacts, and looking for and leveraging leaked secrets like private
keys and database certificates in attacks.

Threat actors have also attempted to trick developers into accidentally
installing malicious packages by exploiting common typing errors or using slight
variations in the name of a legitimate package ("g00gle" instead of "google,"
for instance). Such typosquatting attacks continue unabated, despite efforts by
organizations and the maintainers of PyPI and other registries to protect
against them.

The challenge with Revival Hijack is that the technique does not rely on a
victim making a mistake, as is typically the case with typosquatting and some of
the other attack methods. "Updating a 'once safe' package to its latest version
is viewed as a safe operation by many users (although it shouldn't!)," JFrog
noted. "Many CI/CD machines are already set up to install these packages
automatically."


REUSING ABANDONED PACKAGE NAMES

According to JFrog, when a developer removes a project from PyPI, the associated
package names become immediately available for anyone else to use. This means an
attacker can easily hijack the package names and infect any user of the original
packages that might try to update to the latest version. Any user that might
want to install it for the first time on the assumption that it is the original
would be similarly affected.

To test the effectiveness of the attack vector, JFrog researchers first created
an empty project and published it to PyPI as "revival-package version 1.0.0,"
using a test "origin_author" account. After publishing the project, the
researchers removed it from PyPI and almost immediately published another empty
package with the same name to PyPI, but from a different "new_authr" account and
different version number 4.0.0.

The exercise showed PyPI displaying JFrog's second empty package simply as a new
version of the company's original "revival-package" with no indication that it
contained very different code. Had JFrog's original package actually been
legitimate code that developers were using, a CI/CD system would have downloaded
the "new" version on the assumption it was an update.

"After demonstrating that hijacking removed legitimate packages can be easily
done, [we] decided to analyze how many packages on PyPI were susceptible to
'Revival Hijack,' meaning that they were previously removed and can now be
replaced/hijacked," JFrog said.


A CLEAR AND PRESENT THREAT

The JFrog researchers' search showed a staggering 120,000 removed packages that
attackers could potentially hijack to sneak malware onto PyPI. When the
researchers filtered the results to only include packages that had been active
for at least months or that users had previously downloaded more than 100,000
times, that number dropped to around 22,000 packages.

To prevent adversaries from misusing these abandoned package names, JFrog
researchers "hijacked" the most popular of these packages and replaced them with
empty ones. They also ensured that the version number on all the empty packages
was 0.0.0.1, to ensure that no one using the original packages would
accidentally download the empty package as an update.

Even despite this precaution JFrog's empty packages racked up nearly 200,000
automatic and manual downloads over a three-month period, showing that the
Revival Hijack threat is very real, the security vendor said. "This seems to
indicate that there are outdated jobs and scripts out there which are still
looking for the deleted packages, or users that manually downloaded these
packages due to typosquatting," JFrog said.

In an actual attack scenario, an adversary would have likely attached a high
version number to each hijacked package so CI/CD systems would automatically
download them believing them to be updates, JFrog said. The company has
recommended that PyPI completely prohibit the reuse of abandoned package names.
Organizations using PyPI also need to be aware of this attack vector when
upgrading to new package versions, JFrog warned.




ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jai Vijayan, Contributing Writer



Jai Vijayan is a seasoned technology reporter with over 20 years of experience
in IT trade journalism. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Computerworld,
where he covered information security and data privacy issues for the
publication. Over the course of his 20-year career at Computerworld, Jai also
covered a variety of other technology topics, including big data, Hadoop,
Internet of Things, e-voting, and data analytics. Prior to Computerworld, Jai
covered technology issues for The Economic Times in Bangalore, India. Jai has a
Master's degree in Statistics and lives in Naperville, Ill.

See more from Jai Vijayan, Contributing Writer


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