[m90]

Wouldn't this just make the number of packages that can be targeted smaller? E.g. I publish a testrunner that needs to install Headless Chrome if not present via postinstall. People trust me and put the package on their allowlist. My account gets compromised and a malicious update is published. People execute malicious code they have never vetted.

I do understand this is still better than npm right now, but it's still broken.

[acdha]

Security is usually full of incremental improvements like that, however. Reducing the scope from all of NPM to the handful of things like test runners would be an enormous benefit for auditors and would encourage consolidation (e.g. most testing frameworks could consolidate on a single headless chrome package), and in the future this could be further improved by things like restricting the scope of those scripts using the operating system sandbox features.

[jonkoops]

Security is layered, no layer will conclusively keep you safe, but each one make it harder to pierce to the core. For example, the impact of the recent SHA1-Hulud attack would be much less, as compromised packages (that previously did not have any scripts executing at install time), would not suddenly start executing, as they are not allowlisted.