Security researchers are sorting through a complex, stealthy, and fast-moving supply-chain attack aimed at pushing information-stealing malware by compromising the account of the maintainer of multiple Rust crates and introducing four more attacker-owned crates. In addition, researchers with Wiz wrote that there also appears to be overlap with supply chain campaigns run by nation-state actors linked to the government of North Korea. According to multiple reports, unknown threat actors this week compromised the maintainer account behind arrayref, a widely used package with more than 245 million downloads that Sai Likhith, backend engineer with StepSecurity, described as a “tiny array-conversion utility” that is “one of the Rust ecosystem’s quiet load-bearing crates.” Over the next 23 minutes, as part of the same attack, the hackers poisoned two other crates from the same owner, append-only-vec and internment. In addition, the attackers published versions of four other crates – ...
Post-quantum cryptography is often framed as an algorithm replacement exercise. The discussion usually moves quickly toward RSA, elliptic curve cryptography, ML KEM, digital signatures, hybrid key exchange and the question of which algorithms should replace today’s public key systems. For DevOps teams, however, selecting a replacement algorithm is only one part of the problem. The harder task is determining where vulnerable cryptography exists, which applications and infrastructure depend on it, who owns those dependencies, and how difficult each one will be to change. That makes cryptographic inventory one of the most important foundations of quantum readiness. NIST’s current Migration to Post Quantum Cryptography project specifically identifies cryptographic visibility and risk management as a core workstream and recommends building and maintaining a comprehensive cryptographic inventory to guide migration. The inventory covers algorithms, protocols, keys, certificates, ...