Dependency confusion

Artifact Security Container Security Open Source Security CI/CD Posture

Dependency confusion is a type of supply chain attack that occurs when an attacker exploits the way some package managers, such as npm and PyPI, resolve dependencies when installing software libraries.
In a typical software development project, developers rely on a variety of external libraries, often referred to as dependencies, to build their applications.
These libraries are typically stored in a remote repository, and developers use a package manager to install and manage them.
An attacker will utilize prior knowledge of usage of dependencies (*Discover used open-source dependencies*) to upload a malicious package with the same name to a public repository.
This might "confuse" package managers to use to public resource instead of the local one - thus executing or infecting the CI/CD.
This can happen on the developer's machine or the build system and has the potential to further steps of an attack - for example, if the malicious code exfiltrate an access token to production environment

Where this idea came from

Security research

Birsan 2021; Google bin-entry harvesting, TXTBOOK, sl4x0 waves; conference: Black Hat USA 2026 “ThreatForest: Automated Attack Trees from Source Code” and “The 0-Day Engine” formalize how researchers reason about dependency attack paths.

Mitigations

M1200 Verify package authenticity
M1201 Restrict egress traffic in CI/CD
M1500 Verify third-party artifacts and open-source libraries
M1502 Define trusted package managers and repositories

Detections

D1090 Implement package or image integrity verification
D1260 Implement regular security audit and review
D1510 Implement Intrusion Detection System and anti-malware
D1590 Implement continuous monitoring and logging of the CI/CD process

Dependency confusion

Where this idea came from

Mitigations

Detections

Observed in incidents (13)

References