Dependency cooldowns turn you into a free-rider

Then I sincerely hope my bank and doctor and government offices are all free-riders.

Dependency cooldowns, like staged update rollouts, mean less brittleness / more robustness in that not every part of society is hit at once. And the fact that cooldowns are not evenly distributed is a good thing. Early adopters and vibe coders take more chances, banks should take less.

But yeah, upload queues also make sense. We should have both!

You can do this everywhere. Not just libraries. I take great pleasure in using the old 2022 LTS builds of Unity. The stability of these products is incredible compared to the latest versions. I simply have to ignore console errors in unity 6. In 2022 they are much more meaningful.

Think about how much cumulative human suffering must be experienced to bring you stable and effective products like this. Why hit the reset button right when things start getting good every time?

Having skimmed the article I understand the title. While I agree on some level I wholly disagree on another: to me "dependency cooldown" is a way to automate something as old as time: the late-adopter-laggard. Although I am a tech-nerd and like the latest stuff. I have almost always let other people try it out first. I've missed out on some things because of it but if you are more conservative in your actions it just happens naturally. I think it is OK to have a dependency cooldown, in fact not everybody should update to the newest stuff right away. It's good to have cascaded updates. See the crowd-strike incident in 2024. If some people want to be later in the chain so be it. They will also miss out on important security updates by their cooldown time. I'd advocate for the feature despite never having used it. So "collectively rational" in my mind.

> Fundamental in the dependency cooldown plan is the hope that other people - those who weren't smart enough to configure a cooldown - serve as unpaid, inadvertent beta testers for newly released packages.

This is wrong to an extent.

This plan works by letting software supply chain companies find security issues in new releases. Many security companies have automated scanners for popular and less popular libraries, with manual triggers for those libraries which are not in the top N.

Their incentive is to be the first to publish a blog post about a cool new attack that they discovered and that their solution can prevent.

Okay sure, but what happens when a high CVE is discovered that requires immediate patching – does that get around the Upload Queue? If so, it's possible one could opportunistically co-author the patch and shuttle in a vulnerability, circumventing the Upload Queue.

If you instead decide that the Upload Queue can't be circumvented, now you're increasing the duration a patch for a CVE is visible. Even if the CVE disclosure is not made public, the patch sitting in the Upload Queue makes it far more discoverable.

Best as I can tell, neither one of these fairly obvious issues are covered in this blog post, but they clearly need to be addressed for Upload Queues to be a good alternative.

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Separately, at least with NPM, you can define a cooldown in your global .npmrc, so the argument that cooldowns need to be implemented per project is, for at least one (very) common package manger, patently untrue.

# Wait 7 days before installing > npm config set min-release-age 7

The people who will benefit from a cooldown weren’t reviewing updates anyway. Without the cooldown they would just be one more malware victim. If you don’t review code before you update, it just makes sense to wait until others have. Despite what the article says, the only people who benefit from a rush to update are the malware spreaders.

This doesn’t solve the problem either, which is that of the Confused Deputy [1]. An arbitrary piece of code I’m downloading shouldn’t be able to run as Ryan by default with access to everything Ryan has.

We need to revitalize research into capabilities-based security on consumer OSs, which AFAIK is the only thing that solves this problem. (Web browsers - literally user “agents” - solve this problem with capabilities too: webapps get explicit access to resources, no ambient authority to files, etc.)

Solving this problem will only become more pressing as we have more agents acting on our behalf.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confused_deputy_problem

One thing people miss is that bugs in open source are much much easier to fix when you catch them right away. You find more bugs when you test aggressively, but the effort per bug is usually significantly lower.

I think the key is to differentiate testing from deployment: you don't need to run bleeding edge everywhere to find bugs and contribute. Even running nightly releases on one production instance will surface real problems.

It keeps me thinking that every company loves "those guys" who create OpenSource but won't give them a broken penny, nor support them in any other way

Servants! Just do your open source magic, We're impatient! Ah and thanks for all the code, our hungry hungry LLMs were starving.

The core point is of course solid. By not updating on day 0, maybe somebody else spend the effort to discover this and you didn't. But there are plenty of other benefits for not rolling with the newest and greatest versions enabled.

I'd argue for intentional dependency updates. It just so happens that it's identified in one sprint and planned for the next one, giving the team a delay.

First of all, sometimes you can reject the dependency update. Maybe there is no benefit in updating. Maybe there are no important security fixes brought by an update. Maybe it breaks the app in one way or another (and yes, even minor versions do that).

After you know why you want to update the dependency, you can start testing. In an ideal world, somebody would look at the diff before applying this to production. I know how this works in the real world, don't worry. But you have the option of catching this. If you automatically update to newest you don't have this option.

And again, all these rituals give you time - maybe someone will identify attacks faster. If you perform these rituals, maybe that someone will be you. Of course, it is better for the business to skip this effort because it saves time and money.

Would staying at an LTS version instead of running my production workloads on the bleeding edge also be free-riding, because I am depriving the community of my testing?

Not everyone has the same update cycle. That's not free-riding. The framing around not being on the latest version as irresponsible doesn't hold up.

I think what you actually want is audit sharing as the cooldown period. No audit shared with the community yet? The package is still in cooldown. Or you can risk it and run unaudited dependencies or audit it yourself and potentially share that.

It seems to me that many organizations are relying on other companies to do their auditing in any case, why not just admit that and explicitly rely on that? Choose who you trust, accept their audits. Organizations can perform or even outsource their own auditing and publish that.

https://mozilla.github.io/cargo-vet/

One thing I don't understand about cooldowns is that it seems that if everybody uses cooldowns then there is no effective cooldown. Then you ll have to keep increase the cooldown period to get the advanatage...

> Dependency cooldowns turn you into a free-rider

Avg tech company: "that's perfect, we love to be free riders."

Yes the publish-distribute delay pattern looks like a reasonable design.

But you’re not a “free-rider” if you intentionally let others leap before you. You’re just being cautious, which is rational behavior and should be baked into assumptions about how any ecosystem actually works.

That can sometimes be true, but the reverse is also problematic: Uniform automatic updates can turn some users who were happy with the status-quo into unwitting guinea pigs for unexpected features and changes, without informed consent.

All else being equal, I'd rather the people who desire the new features be the earlier-adopters, because they're more likely to be the ones pushing for changes and because they're more likely to be watching what happens.

I thought that this article is largely theoretical in nature. I have almost never updated a dependency in a commercial product in a timely fashion, unless it was explicitly a vulnerability fix. I believe very few companies will do that. Upgrades cause frictions so people do as little of them as possible anyways. I was confused about the terminology to begin with because in a decade of software development I never had to advocate to slow down updating dependencies … that sounds like absolutely wishful thinking. Maybe we can pay money to audit new releases of software we depend on, sure, but that is an entirely different issue.

The topic of cooldowns just shifting the problem around got some discussion on an earlier post about them -- what I said there is at https://lobste.rs/s/rygog1/we_should_all_be_using_dependency... and here's something similar:

- One idea is for projects not to update each dep just X hours after release, but on their own cycles, every N weeks or such. Someone still gets bit first, of course, but not everyone at once, and for those doing it, any upgrade-related testing or other work also ends up conveniently batched.

- Developers legitimately vary in how much they value getting the newest and greatest vs. minimizing risk. Similar logic to some people taking beta versions of software. A brand new or hobby project might take the latest version of something; a big project might upgrade occasionally and apply a strict cooldown. For users' sake, there is value in any projects that get bit not being the widely-used ones!

- Time (independent of usage) does catch some problems. A developer realizes they were phished and reports, for example, or the issue is caught by someone looking at a repo or commit stream.

As I lamented in the other post, it's unfortunate that merely using an upgraded package for a test run often exposes a bunch of a project's keys and so on. There are more angles to attack this from than solely when to upgrade packages.

It's open source. Free riding is expected and normal. We all benefit from the work of others.

If you're not doing the work yourself, it makes sense to give the people who review and test their dependencies some time to do their work.

itd be better for the title to be about upload queues and distribution, rather than free-loading.

idk if one of the touted benefits is really real - you need to be able to jump changes to the front of the queue and get them out asap sometimes.

hacked credentials will definitely be using that path. it gives you another risk signal sure, but the power sticks around

Mature professionals and organizations have always waited to install updated dependencies in production, with exceptions for severe security issues such as zero day attacks.

"Free riding" is not the right term here. It's more a case of being the angels in the saying "fools rush in where angels fear to tread".

If the industry as a whole were mature (in the sense of responsibility, not age), upgrades would be tested in offline environments and rolled out once they pass that process.

Of course, not everyone has the resources for that, so there's always going to be some "free riding" in that sense.

That dilutes the term, though. Different organizations have different tolerance for risk, different requirements for running the latest stuff, different resources. There's always going to be asymmetry there. This isn't free riding.

If lawmakers understood even an iota of technology they'd be trying to legislate using your ID card to upload npm dependencies with more than 10k downloads instead of for watching porn.

But alas.

Cooldown is merely a type of flighting. Specifically, picking a flight beyond canary.

I just feel like this problem is something where unfettered capitalism does not work. What we are discussing here is a public utility, and should be managed as such

Hoo boy.

Anyone in the IT Ops side of things knows the adage that you don't run ".0" software. You wait for a while to let the kinks get worked out by those who can afford the risk of downtime, and of the vendors to find and work out bugs in new software on their own.

Are conservative, uptime-oriented organizations "free-riders" for waiting to install new software on critical systems? Is that a sin, as this implies?

The answer is no. It's certainly a quandry - someone has to run it first. But a little time to let it bake in labs and low-risk environments is worth it.

this is like the guiltying me about carbon offsets when there are mountains of burning tires in kuwait

I would argue the blind copy pasting, cargo cult orgs are less likely to be helpful anyway.

But I get the point, it's a numbers game so any and all usage can help catching issues.

Or you could just, like, not update things immediately just because you can. It's wild that we now refer to it as a "cooldown" to not immediately update something. The sane way would be each user upgrades when they feel they need to, and then updates would naturally be staggered. The security risks of vulnerabilities are magnified by everyone rushing to upgrade constantly.

> Python has multiple package managers at this point (how many now? 8?). All must implement dependency cooldowns.

No, nobody _has to_ implement it, and if only one did, then users who wanted cooldowns can migrate to that package manager.

Sure, in the way that people who only use Debian stable are free riding or using Rust are free riding nightly users.

One thing not addressed is the incentive for large software packages to make their own repositories that bypass this queue in order to have instant updates.

Frankly, this reads as sometime going way too far to be contrary. Yeah, sure, Act Utilitarianism is different than Rule Utilitarianism. News at 11. But most developers don't get the luxury of fighting for the greater good. Most are fighting to keep their paycheck flowing so they can eat. What I'm saying is, insecure software comes from organizational dysfunction, not "bad developers adopting software too quickly." It's a corporate political problem to which you're attempting to apply technical management to solve.

The brilliance of the implementation of cooldowns: For someone to go download and run it, automated or otherwise, they simply follow the standard installation process.

Users who want take the extra precaution of waiting an additional period of time must decide to manually configure this with their tooling.

This practice has been a thing in the sysadmin community for years and years - most sysadmins know that you never install Windows updates on the day they release.

Having a step before publication means that's it's essentially opt-in pre-release software, and that comes with baggage - I have zero doubts that many entities who download packages to scan for malware explicitly exclude pre-release software, or don't discover it at all until it's released through normal channels.