We live in a world that has walls and those walls need to be guarded by people with swords.
Eh… not a literal sword in this case😀, but with behaviors that can help keep your assets more secure and protect against bad actors.
Previously, Azure Artifacts feeds presented package versions from all of its upstream sources. This includes package versions that were originally pushed to an Azure Artifacts feed (internally sourced) and package versions from common public repositories like npmjs.com , NuGet.org , Maven Central, and PyPI (externally sourced).
Today, we’re excited to announce a new behavior that provides additional security for your private feeds by limiting access to externally sourced packages when internally sources packages are already present. This provides a new layer of security, which prevents malicious packages from a public registry being inadvertently consumed. These changes will not affect any package versions that are already in use or cached in your feed.
The security behavior applies:
- when an internally sourced version is already in your feed, or
- when consuming a package from your feed for the first time (i.e. it is not yet in your feed), and at least one of the versions available from an upstream is internally sourced.
With the new behavior, any versions from the public registry will be blocked and not made available to download. You are able to configure the upstream behavior to allow externally sourced package versions if you choose to.
Learn more about common package scenarios where you need to allow externally sourced package versions along with a few other scenarios where no blockage to the public packages is needed and how to configure the upstream behavior.
Organizations that wish to opt out of this additional protective behavior can disable a newly added organization-wide security policy. To do this,
- Go to organization settings
- Click on policies under the security section
- In the security policies section, toggle off ‘Additional protections when using public package registries’
Other Resources
Learn more about protecting private package feeds: Ways to Mitigate Risk Using Private Package Feeds
We want to hear your feedback!
As always, we want our Artifact Services to meet the evolving needs of our community. Post a comment or use the Developer community to provide feedback or ask questions about these changes to upstream behavior.
Spent a lot of time resolving issues caused by this change. As a developer without these permissions to change the settings mentioned, how can I resolve this scenario:
This situation happens literally many many packages that I use from nuget.org. Now I cannot find them just because one of the internal upstreams use an old version and include the old package in it.
@Michael Can you please share some solutions to such a scenario.
Thank you!
Alright, but its not showing up.
In the section you mention it literally does not exist.
@Matt. Thanks for you message. If you mean the security section,
You have to go to the organization setting to see that. The reason you may not be able to see the section is that you are in your project settings.
Literally spent an hour supporting builds failing because of this. “Why are upstream sources failing to get the latest version.”
Maybe features that block functionality should be an Opt-in, instead of an opt out.
Further added pain: This forced-opt-in feature forces a user to re-enable every library to be downloaded from external sources.
@Brown We would like to hear about cases where there’s been greater than expected disruption. If you’re interested in sharing your scenario, please use our Developer Community site to submit feedback, and we can engage with you there.
The feature is was enabled by default because it relates to security for our customers. The vulnerability with some package managers/project configurations has been publicly disclosed, so in this particular case we chose to prioritize secure-by-default over...
@Brown, We’re sorry that you were inconvenienced by the upstream behavior change.
For most package usage scenarios the new behavior should not interrupt existing flows. There are less common scenarios where explicitly allowing external versions is needed, as explained here.
I think having this feature off by default is a good thing but the UX/discoverability is really bad. You have to wildly click around on icons on that page to reveal that switch.
@Stefan, thanks for your feedback on the UX/discoverability. We are working on improving the experience for customers.