Bitwarden CLI compromised in ongoing Checkmarx supply chain campaign

> presumably this comprise was only found out because a lot of people did update

This was supposedly discovered by "Socket researchers", and the product they're selling is proactive scanning to detect/block malicious packages, so I'd assume this would've been discovered even if no regular users had updated.

But I'd claim even for malware that's only discovered due to normal users updating, it'd generally be better to reduce the number of people affected with a slow roll-out (which should happen somewhat naturally if everyone sets, or doesn't set, their cool-down based on their own risk tolerance/threat model) rather than everyone jumping onto the malicious package at once and having way more people compromised than was necessary for discovery of the malware.

That assumes discovering a security bug is random and it could happen to anyone, so more shots on goal is better. But is that a good way to model it?

Ir seems like if you were at all likely to be giving dependencies the extra scrutiny that discovers a problem, you’d probably know it? Most of the people who upgraded didn’t help, they just got owned.

A cooldown gives anyone who does investigate more time to do their work.

Cooldown sounds like a good idea ONLY IF these so called security companies can catch these malicious dependencies during the cooldown period. Are they doing this bit or individual researchers find a malware and these companies make headlines?

It's a trade off for sure, maybe if companies could have "honeypot" environments where they update everything and deploy their code, and try to monitor for sneaky things.

If I were in charge of a package manager I would be seriously looking into automated and semi automated exploit detection so that people didn't have to yolo new packages to find out if they are bad. The checking would itself become an attack vector, but you could mitigate that too. I'm just saying _something_ is possible.

Build from source is a great idea, I assume you provide SLSA/sigstore like provenance as well?

Other package managers are magically immune?

Yep! depsguard sets trustPolicy: "no-downgrade" where applicable.

"Just" is doing a lot of work; most ecosystems are not set up or equipped to do this kind of server-side queuing in 2026. That's not to say that we shouldn't do this, but nobody has committed the value (in monetary and engineering terms) to realizing it. Perhaps someone should.

By contrast, a client-side cooldown doesn't require very much ecosystem or index coordination.

The approach you outline is totally compatible with an additional one or two day time gate for the artifact mirrors that back prod builds. Deploy in locked-down non-prod environments with strong monitoring after the scans pass, wait a few days for prod, and publicly report whatever you find, and you're now "doing your part" in real-time while still accounting for the fallibility of your automated tools.

There's risk there of a monoculture categorically missing some threats if everyone is using the same scanners. But I still think that approach is basically pro-social even if it involves a "cooldown".

I agree, even without project glasswing (that Microsoft is part of) even with cheaper models, and Microsoft's compute (Azure, OpenAI collaboration), it makes no sense that private companies needs to scan new package releases and find malware before npm does. I'm sure they have some reason for it (people rely on packages to be immediately available on npm, and the real use case of patching a zero day CVE quickly), but until this is fixed fundamentally, I'd say the default should be a cooldown (either serverside or not) and you'll need to opt in to get the current behavior. This might takes years of deprecation though, I'm sure it was turned on now, a lot of things would break. (e.g. every CVE public disclosure will also have to wait that additional cooldown... and if Anthropic are not lying, we are bound for a tsunami of patched CVEs soon...)

It is! It’s a tough problem to balance. The good news is that you can always override for specific cases. Linking to my other reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47880149

Yes but it has nothing to do with the language, and everything to do with the ecosystem (npm tried to make thing such as mandatory MFA etc, npmjs is so big maintainers pushed back)

TypeScript on its own is a great language, with a very interesting type system. Most other type systems can’t run doom.

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/27/typescript-types-can-r...

This isn't a JS specific issue.

it is being attacked precisely because it is ubiquitous. no one is going to attack haskell, erlang or whatever no one uses.

Check your home folder permissions on macos, last time I checked mine were world readable (until I changed them). I was very surprised by it, and only noticed when adding an new user account for my wife.

Yep, depsguard has support for renovate and dependabot cooldown settings too.

malicious versions are recalled and removed when caught - so you don't need to update to the next version

An announcement isn't a quiet action. One would hope that the real maintainers would notice & take action.

The hypothesis you're referring to is something like "if everyone uses a 7-day cooldown, then the malware just doesn't get discovered for 7 days?", right?

An alternative hypothesis: what if 7-day cooldowns incentivize security scanners, researchers, and downstream packagers to race to uncover problems within an 7-day window after each release?

Without some actual evidence, I'm not sure which of these is correct, but I'm pretty sure it's not productive to state either one of these as an accepted fact.

Well, luckily, those who find the malicious activity are usually companies who do this proactively (for the good of the community, and understandably also for marketing). There are several who seem to be trying to be the first to announce, and usually succeed. IMHO it should be Microsoft (as owners of GitHub, owners of npm) who should take the helm and spend the tokens to scan each new package for malicious code. It gets easier and easier to detect as models improve (also gets easier and easier to create, and try to avoid detection on the other hand)

That was my first instinct as well but I'm not sure how true it really is.

Many companies exist now whose main product is supply chain vetting and scanning (this article is from one such company). They are usually the ones writing up and sharing articles like this - so the community would more than likely hear about it even if nobody was actually using the package yet.

care to elaborate?

Manually review the package and override the setting

Yep, that's the main argument against cooldowns, but there are ways to override them. I'll update the docs soon.

Even with ^ you won't get an updated version until somebody runs an install and updates the lockfile.

We have things like dependebot for this.

https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/tutorials/secure-yo...

At this point, the risk of a compromised package outweighs the risk of an upstream vuln that actually matters. Npm audit is full of junk like client side redos vulns, you could probably ignore 90%+ of the reports and still be secure against the majority of of-concern attack classes.

Why would you patch a security vuln in a later version? Should be patched in all versions.. that's what semver is for.

[dead]

That's just direct dependencies. Including all the dependency tree is 785k LOC according to lib.rs. Most rust libraries include tons of others.

https://lib.rs/crates/rbw

> At least they're pinned though.

Frustratingly, they're not by default though; you need to explicitly use `--locked` (or `--frozen`, which is an alias for `--locked --offline`) to avoid implicit updates. I've seen multiple teams not realize this and get confused about CI failures from it.

The implicit update surface is somewhat limited by the fact that versions in Cargo.toml implicitly assume the `^` operator on versions that don't specify a different operator, so "1.2.3" means "1.2.x, where x >= 3". For reasons that have never been clear to me, people also seem to really like not putting the patch version in though and just putting stuff like "1.2", meaning that anything other than a major version bump will get pulled in.

Wait, you're telling me that node deps are not pin by default. Every time you run your code you might be pulling in a new version.

No wonder...

Does it support autofill for other apps on mobile? I'd argue that putting passwords in your phone clipboard could itself be risky (although for someone who's extremely security conscious, maybe discouraging using apps isn't a downside)

A few months ago I tried to build a .NET package on Linux, and the certificate revocation checks for the dependencies didn't complete even after several minutes. Eventually I found out about the option `NUGET_CERTIFICATE_REVOCATION_MODE=offline`, which managed to cause the build to complete in a sane amount of time.

It's hard for me to take seriously any suggestion that .NET is a model for how ecosystems should approach dependency management based on that, but I guess having an abysmal experience when there are dependencies is one way to avoid risks. (I would imagine it's probably not this bad on Windows, or else nobody would use it, but at least personally I have no interest in developing on a stack that I can't expect to work reliably out of the box Linux)

go and python exits with sane stdlib and are already used extensively

Now all they need to figure out is how to actually make the C/C++ code that isn't from dependencies secure and they'll be all set

Password managers are all about trust, the main link is about a compromise, so it's not surprising that the first comment is also about trust too, even if it's not directly about this particular compromise.

I found the default bwcli clunky and unacceptable, and it's why I don't use it, even though I still have a BitWarden subscription.

Not to mention utter nonsense. There’s no possible way that BW CLI somehow injected command history into a remote server. That was 100% something the GP did, a bug in their terminal, or a config they have with ssh/tmux, not Bitwarden.

Exactly. That is the problem.

There is a time and place for where it makes sense and a password manager CLI written in TypeScript importing hundreds of third-party packages is a direct red flag. It is a frequent occurrence.

We have seen it happen with Axios which is one of the biggest supply chain attacks on the Javascript / Typescript ecosystem and it makes no sense to build sensitive tools with that.

It's crazy because it's not default bw behavior, or even any bw behavior... I don't use the cli, but I don't see any built-in capacity to copy bw output to the clipboard. (In the UNIX way, you'd normally pipe it to a clipboard utility if you wanted it copied, and then the security consequences are on you.)

They probably caused it themselves, somehow, and then blamed bitwarden. Note in the original comment they aren't even entirely sure what the command was, and they weren't familiar with it or they wouldn't have been surprised by its output... so how can they be sure what else they did between that command and the weechat thing?

If the terminal or tmux fed terminal history into weechat, that's also not bw's problem.

I don't know, I use a vanilla weechat setup

The problem is that the UX with a browser extension is so much better.

On iOS I feel I have less control over what's running than on Linux (dont get me started on Windows or Android). So that's the order of how I dare to use it. But a supply chain attack: I'll always use a distributed program: the only thing I can do is only use old versions, and trusted distribution channels.

In theory the browser integration shouldn’t leak anything beyond the credentials being used, even if compromised.

When you use autofill, the native application will prompt to disclose credentials to the extension. At that point, only those credentials go over the wire. Others remain inaccessible to the extension.

Exactly this. For anyone who wants to do it for various package managers:

  ~/.npmrc: 
  min-release-age=7 (npm 11.10+)

  ~/Library/Preferences/pnpm/rc: 
  minimum-release-age=10080 (minutes)

  ~/.bunfig.toml 
  [install]: 
  minimumReleaseAge = 604800 (seconds)

(plug: released a small CLI to auto-configure these — https://depsguard.com — I tried to find something that will help non developers quickly apply recommended settings, and couldn't find one)

That is why we have discussions like these: https://x.com/i/status/2039099810943304073

I am not sure that works - imagine that the next shellshock had been found. Would you want to wait 7 days to update?

We need to either screen everybody or cut of countries like North Korea and Iran from the Internet.

If the software gets poisoned then your YubiKey will not save you.

How are they clearly less susceptible to a supply chain attack?

Maybe the web vault, but then we do not know when it's compromised (that's the whole idea); so we trust them not to've made a mess...

Do either of those work on browser extensions that I install as a user? I don't see anything relating to extensions in there.

ah, the old bash.org.

Does it matter? Lots of groups do such checks at startup at this point, because every news outlet who reports on it suddenly believe the group to be Russian if you do, so it's a no brainer to add today to misdirect even a little.

> but it does serve to make it very obvious it was a state actor

Lol no, lots of groups do this, non-state ones too.

It's not impossible, but most KeePass tools are written in sane languages and built with sane tooling, and don't use trash like Javascript and npm. Of course I'm not considering browser extensions or exclusive web-clients, but the main KeePass client has a good autotype system, so you don't really need to use the browser extension.

In any case, the fact that the official BitWarden client (which uses Electron btw) and even the CLI is written in Javascript/Typescript - should tell you everything you need to know about their coding expertise and security posture.

> I don't understand how this solves the issue in this case.

I'd say since it is a local only tool, you don't really need to update it constantly provided you are a sane person that don't use a browser extension. It makes it easier to audit and yourself less at risk of having your tool compromised.

It doesn't have to be keypass though, it can be any local password management tool like pass[1] or its guis or simply a local encrypted file.

[1] https://www.passwordstore.org/

>What makes it impossible for KeePass access tools to have these issues?

the superiority of keepass users scares away the bad actors

Keepass is just a single file, you can share it between devices however you want (google drive, onedrive, dropbox, nextcloud, syncthing, rsync, ftp, etc); as long as you can read and write to it, it just works. There are keepass clients for just about everything (keepassxc for desktops, keepass2android or keepassdx for android, keepassium for iphone).

Not op but I mean you can use a public cloud with Cryptomator on top if you don’t trust your password DB on a non E2E cloud. Or you can just use your own cloud (but then no access outside or can risk and open up infra), and then any of the well known clients on your phone. Can optionally sandbox them if possible and then just be mindful of sync conflicts with the DB file but I assume you, like most people, will 99.9% of the time be reading the DB not writing to it.

Syncthing can synchronize Keepass files between devices quite well.

I use MacOS and iOS for home home devices and Windows for work, and use Strongbox on the Apple side with KeePassXC on the Windows side and sync them using DropBox.

Someone is about hop on and tell you how they simply run a Dropbox/GDrive to host their keepass vault and how that’s good enough for me (which should be Keepass’s tagline) and mobile they use a copy or some other manually derived and dependency ridden setup. They will support ad hoc over designed because their choice of ad hoc cloud is better than a service you use.

For me it is nextcloud + wireguard

I mean there are ways i.e. if you run something like tailscale and can always access your private network etc. but it is a hassle.

Plus, now you're responsible for everything. Backups, auditing etc.

I use self-hosted Bitwarden (Vaultwarden) for this. It runs on my local network, and I have it installed on my phone etc. When I’m on my local network, everything works fine. When I’m not on my local network, the phone still has the credentials from the last time it was synced (i.e., last time it was used while the phone was on the home network). It’s a pretty painless way to keep things in sync without ever allowing Bitwarden to be accessible outside my home network.

In short, when I make a major password or credential change I do it from my laptop, consider that file on disk to be the "master" copy, and then manually sync the file on a periodic basis to my phone. I treat the file on the phone as read-only. Works fine so far.

To date there have been zero instances when I needed to significantly change a password/service/login/credential solely from my phone and I was unable to access my laptop.

Additionally the file gets synchronized to a workstation that sits in my home office accessible by personal VPN, where it can be accessed in a shell session with the keepass CLI: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/kpcli

You can use an extremely wide variety of your own choice of secure methods for how to get the file from the primary workstation (desktop/laptop) to your phone.

what "infra"? keepass works locally, and just opens a database file. it works the same as any other password manager.

The average user is reusing their password everywhere, and rotation means changing the numeral 6 at the end of the password to 7.

I actually was a Bitwarden user at first, but over time in reality the frequency that I change email/password is not that much. It's not like I change those things every hour or every day like with my work files/documents and need constant syncing to the drive. And the chance that I add/change passwords at 2 devices at a close time is even less.

So gradually I don't feel I need syncing that much any more and switched to Keepass. I made my mind that I'll only change the database from my computer and rclone push that to any cloud I like (I'm using Koofr for that since it's friendly to rclone) then in any other devices I'll just rclone pull them after that when needed. If I change something in other devices (like phones), I'll just note locally there and change the database later.

But ofc if someone needs to change their data/password frequently then Bitwarden is clearly the better choice.

You save the single password in your head. All other passwords go inside Keepass.

Same as Bitwarden? You just need to remember Keepass password, just like remember Bitwarden password.

This article is borderline malicious in how it skirts the facts.

This wasn't a case where KeePass was compromised in any way, as far as I can tell. This appears to be a basic case of a threat actor distributing a trojanized version via malicious ads. If users made sure they are getting the correct version, they were never in danger. That's not to say that a supply chain attack couldn't affect KeePass, but this article doesn't say that it has.

That looks like you'd have to download and run a hacked installer that was never avaliable from an official location. That is a much lower risk than a supply-chain attack where anyone building birwarden-cli from the official repo would be infected via the compromised dependency.

Long term keepass users aren't going to be affected. If you mention software to others make sure you send them a link to a known safe download location instead of having them search for one (as new users searching like that are more at risk of stumbling on a malicious copy of the official site hosting a hacked version).

This AI generated article is not about vulnerabilities in KeePass, rather about malicious KeePass clones.

Happy 1password user for more than a decade.

It's only a matter of time until _they_ are also popped :(.

I think most people use keepassxc, not original keepass.

That's an AI slop article. I'm not sure how someone creating their own installer and buying a few domains to distribute it is a mark against KeePass itself.

> The beacon established command and control over HTTPS

What do you use?

That's just not true.

The original pass is just a single shell script. It's short, pretty easy to read and likely in part because it's so simple, it's also very stable. The only real dependencies are bash, gnupg and optionally git (history/replication). These are most likely already on your machine and whatever channel you're getting them from (ex: distribution package manager) should be much more resilient to supply chain vulnerabilities.

It can also be used with a pgp smartcard (in my case a Yubikey) so all encryption/decryption happens on the smartcard. Every attempt to decrypt a credential requires a physical button press of the yubikey, making it pretty obvious if some malware is trying to dump the contents of the password store.

I hope you're not using KeePassX, it's been unmaintained for years. KeePassXC is only available for Linux, which means I'd need to use a third-party app for Mac and iOS, so I'd be trusting three vendors instead of one.

Aside from passwords, I store passkeys, secure notes, and MFA tokens.

Seamless syncing is the primary reason I stick with BW

JS apps need more direct dependencies and transitives to do basic things vs. other languages.

Maybe language based package managers aren't great. Also, npm has design decisions that make it especially prone to supply chain attacks iirc

Where does it answer this question in the article?

kinda crazy to see this comment required in this particular context, yet here we are

The article waffles on forever and gives some generic advice.

Meanwhile, Bitwarden themselves state that end users were almost never affected: https://community.bitwarden.com/t/bitwarden-statement-on-che...

You had to install the CLI through NPM at a very short time frame for it to be affected. If you did get infected, you have to assume all secrets on your computer were accessed and that any executable file you had write access to may be backdoored.

No it doesn't?

This one also involved npm to be fair

Don't GitHub Actions actually use npm?

The new Windows 98

This is the break right now, we will smile back on these times

The above comment is just a bunch of generalizations not meant to address seriously that's why.