purpleailab Supply-Chain Exploitation — Category Overview
This is a routing skill for supply-chain attack research. Sub-skills cover specific techniques against the dependency, build, and distribution layers.
Sub-Skills
| Sub-Skill | Covers | When to Load |
|---|---|---|
| dep-confusion | Public-registry impersonation of private package names, scoped-package abuse (@org/pkg), internal-name OSINT (lockfiles, GitHub Actions, Dockerfiles, error pages) |
Target uses private npm/PyPI/RubyGems/Cargo registries and you've discovered internal package names in public artifacts |
Surface Discovery
# Lockfiles often expose private package names that aren't on public registry
grep -hE '"name":|"@.+/' package-lock.json yarn.lock pnpm-lock.yaml | sort -u
# pip
grep -E '^[a-z0-9_-]+' requirements.txt
# go.mod
grep '^\s*[a-z0-9./_-]\+\s' go.mod
# Maven
grep -A1 '<artifactId>' pom.xml | grep -v '^--$'
Decision Notes
- Always confirm scope authorization in writing before publishing any package, even a benign one, to a public registry. Some bounty programs explicitly disallow public-registry submissions.
- Use a beacon-only payload (DNS callback, HTTPS GET) for confirmation; never ship code that mutates the target environment without an explicit follow-up authorization.
- Real damage from confusion attacks is usually post-install scripts (
postinstall,setup.py install) — focus PoCs on benign callbacks, not RCE. - For build-pipeline poisoning (workflow injection, branch protection bypass) see
/skills/standard/exploit/ad/SKILL.md(CI-as-AD-equivalent paths) and the broader threat-modeling under/skills/shared/opsec/SKILL.md.