We eliminated 1,400 CVEs in NanoClaw's container images

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47 points by omrimaya 3 hours ago on hackernews | 30 comments

KaiserPro | 2 hours ago

so s/bookworm/trixie/g didn't work then?

Yes, this is mostly a joke, I am able to understand the difference between base distros.

: iririririr | an hour ago
a spot on "joke". deb12 is gone for a month now.

halestock | 2 hours ago

Pretty impressive to introduce 1400 CVEs in a project that's only ~7 months old.

devin | 2 hours ago

If the thing measuring whether there are CVEs is also the thing creating said CVEs, are we sure they are even CVEs? Deduped? Etc.

GavCo | 2 hours ago

These are CVEs in the base image and in standard lib dependencies. For example, just scanned an unhardened image I built today:

  Unhardened: docker.io/nanoco/nanoclaw:agent-alpha
  71 packages, 344 unique CVEs, linux/arm64

  PACKAGE         VERSION        TYP   C   H   M   L   N  TOT
  -----------------------------------------------------------
  expat           2.5.0          deb   0   4  18   1   2   25
  curl            7.88.1         deb   4   4   6   0   7   21
  hono            4.12.14        npm   0   1  18   2   0   21
  libtiff         4.5.0          deb   0   2   1   1  15   20
  perl            5.36.0         deb   5   6   3   0   3   17
  pnpm            10.33.0        npm   0   8   7   0   0   15
  glibc           2.36           deb   1   2   2   1   7   13
  openjpeg        2.5.0          deb   0   0   3   1   9   13
  cups            2.4.2          deb   0   2   8   0   1   11
  glib2           2.74.6         deb   1   7   1   0   1   10
  tar             1.34(+2)       deb   1   1   7   0   1   10
  llvm            15.0.6         deb   0   0   0   1   9   10
  sqlite3         3.40.1         deb   1   2   3   0   3    9
  nss             3.87.1         deb   1   0   3   0   4    8
  avahi           0.8            deb   0   0   8   0   0    8
  util-linux      2.38.1         deb   0   0   3   0   2    7
  elf             0.188          deb   0   0   0   0   7    7
  libssh2         1.10.0         deb   1   4   1   0   0    6
  openldap        2.5.13         deb   0   1   0   0   5    6
  chromium        151.0.7922.108 deb   0   5   0   0   0    5
  -----------------------------------------------------------
  UNIQUE CVEs                         16  68 121  17 119  344

  (+51 more packages, 102 findings)

  C/H/M/L/N = critical/high/medium/low/negligible.
  Counts are unique CVEs: binaries from one source package are
  grouped (libcurl4 + libcurl3-gnutls + curl = curl), so a CVE
  hitting three of them counts once, not three times.

viccis | 56 minutes ago

Are these real findings, or a situation in which fixes have been backported? At one place I worked, the corpsec guys were wildly incompetent and would try to bury me in "CVEs" in my systems that were nothing but "vulnerable" software versions with all of the "identified" vulnerabilities fixed by Debian backported patches.

: lokar | 54 minutes ago
That’s not security, it’s compliance.

random3 | an hour ago

It’s like it’s made of CVEs. First 50-100 should be a good sign if it’s cleaner to start over.

mohamedkoubaa | 47 minutes ago

Hold my beer

iandanforth | 2 hours ago

I don't understand the 'custom patch' strategy over 'fix the app with a major version change' strategy.

aliasxneo | an hour ago

I'm convinced you can tackle 5-10 "CVEs" a day, make a little dashboard, put some pretty graphs on it, and send it to your exec team and probably get accolades. Nevermind that the CVEs had nothing to do with your product.

: nathancahill | an hour ago
This is how Vanta et al. make millions.
: lokar | 52 minutes ago
My favorite urgent must fix CVE from compliance was a bug in the Linux PCMCIA driver on some EC2 VMs.

evanjrowley | an hour ago

Why is the Node ecosystem like this? Why do people continue to choose it for popular projects vs. anything else?

itintheory | 57 minutes ago

It's the opposite of NIH syndrome. Need to left pad a string? Just import a library from some rando on the internet!

: sophacles | 41 minutes ago
When node was new there were many browsers (different rendering and js engines, not just chrome reskins) and standards and "proto standards" were moving very fast. Different browsers and versions would have very different support for CSS directives, tag behavior, etc. This was a real pain in the ass to make a site consistent across different browsers - every other line of code would require a full switch statement based on browser and version it seemed, and all of these things would need updating every time some browser had an update.
The answer to this was something called polyfills, a library that did something as simple as element.center() with just 500 lines of code to make it consistent on all browsers, and all the places you want to center that element are updated by the polyfill authors and your code doesn't need to be touched.
All the sites that weren't using good polyfills broke (or at least looked terrible) for days every time there was a new $browser update.
Since thats the javascript environment node was born into, the style was carried over by inertia and habit, for better and worse.

ljm | 46 minutes ago

Because, like it or not, it does Write Once, Use Anywhere better than Java ever did.

It is pretty much the lowest common denominator for code.

eviks | 18 minutes ago

Primarily because of the original sin of JS being an awfully designed language. Partially because it's the most popular.

tptacek | 9 minutes ago

Because it's written in Javascript and there are classes of highly-situational and not-especially-meaningful vulnerabilities that broadly impact the entire ecosystem ("prototype pollution" is the canonical example) that get counted individually in every occurrence in every NPM package.

It's not a real number, and, worse, it obscures the real figure of merit (/demerit). The Node ecosystem does have a real problem with its culture of sprawling dependencies. But it's not the first-order issue with this "1400" number.

tptacek | 50 minutes ago

If you're not a security person, the unspoken subtext here: the overwhelming majority of these "CVEs" do not matter to the project, and a very large number of them don't matter at all. They're pro-forma findings, like ReDOS in code paths that are rarely used, or, even more commonly, "prototype pollution" issues.

Surac | 41 minutes ago

let me guess. they wrote a promt that told claude do undo all bugs?

bryan0 | 40 minutes ago

Why hasn't looking at EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) become a more standard approach than just raw CVEs?

prymitive | 39 minutes ago

For those unfamiliar, “CVE” stands for “CV Enrichment”, common slang in Posture Engineering

: 482937632992 | 33 minutes ago
"'They' just don't want you to know how incredibly secure this vibeslopped clawshit is."

raver1975 | 31 minutes ago

That's what happens when you vibe code.

sajithdilshan | 28 minutes ago

I wonder how many new CVEs were introduced while patching these

eviks | 21 minutes ago

What is NanoClaw? Glad you asked:

> NanoClaw is a secure, lightweight alternative to OpenClaw.

overgard | 17 minutes ago

I'm pretty skeptical you can call any claw-like thing secure unless you solve prompt injection.

: stavros | 9 minutes ago
Security isn't binary. There's nothing that's "secure" unless you define a threat model first.

Hamuko | 15 minutes ago

If the lightweight alternative has 1400 CVEs, how many does OpenClaw have?