// Install Safe-NPM globally
npm install -g safe-npm

// Replace your npm command with safe-npm
// Instead of: npm install 
// Use: safe-npm install 

// Example: Install a package with 90-day protection
safe-npm install express

// Configure custom age threshold (in days)
safe-npm install --max-age 60 lodash

// Force install a new package (bypass protection)
safe-npm install --force react-latest

// Check package age before installing
safe-npm info axios

// Integration with npm scripts in package.json
{
  "scripts": {
    "install-safe": "safe-npm install",
    "ci-safe": "safe-npm ci"
  }
}

// Run your normal install script safely
npm run install-safe

The JavaScript ecosystem is bleeding. The recent Shai-Hulud attack, which compromised over 1,200 npm packages and impacted an estimated 1.2 million downstream projects, wasn't an anomaly—it was the latest symptom of a systemic vulnerability. Attackers have perfected a playbook: hijack a popular package, push a malicious update, and watch the infection spread through automated installs within hours. The industry's response has been a patchwork of scanners, audits, and best practices that often arrive too late. Now, a developer named Kevin Slin is proposing a different, deliberately blunt instrument: Safe-NPM, a tool that simply refuses to install any package published in the last 90 days.

The Anatomy of a Modern npm Attack: Speed is the Weapon

To understand why Safe-NPM's age restriction isn't just conservative but strategically clever, you need to examine how today's most damaging supply chain attacks unfold. They are not about subtle, long-term backdoors. They are blitzkriegs.

Take the Chalk/debug compromise from earlier this year. Attackers gained control of the maintainer accounts for these foundational packages. Within minutes of the malicious update being published, it began propagating. CI/CD pipelines pulled it in. Developer machines running npm install fetched it. The malicious code—often designed to steal environment variables, API keys, or cryptocurrency—had a lifespan measured in hours before being detected and taken down. But those hours were enough.

The Shai-Hulud campaign operated similarly but at an industrial scale, using automation to take over accounts and push poisoned updates. The common denominator? The exploit lifecycle from publication to mass installation to detection is often shorter than a week. The vast majority of the damage occurs in the first few days after a malicious update lands. Safe-NPM's 90-day filter creates a massive buffer zone. It forces a cooling-off period where a package must survive in the wild, be downloaded, and used without triggering widespread alarm before it's deemed "safe enough" for installation.

How Safe-NPM Works: A Gatekeeper for Your Package Manager

Safe-NPM isn't a replacement for npm, Yarn, or pnpm. It's a wrapper and a gatekeeper. Built as a Node.js CLI tool, it intercepts your install commands. When you run safe-npm install lodash, it doesn't just fetch the latest version. It queries the npm registry and checks the publication date of the version that would be installed based on your semver range or latest tag.

The logic is straightforward:

• Check: What version of 'lodash' will be installed?
• Analyze: When was that specific version published?
• Decide: Is that date more than 90 days ago?
• Act: If YES, proceed with a normal install via the underlying package manager. If NO, block the install and report the package version and its publication date.

This means you can still use all your existing workflows and project files. The package.json stays the same. Safe-NPM adds the security check as a pre-install step. For teams, this can be integrated into CI systems to enforce the policy across the entire development organization, creating a unified defense layer that doesn't rely on every developer being constantly vigilant.

The Trade-Off: Security vs. Freshness

The immediate objection is obvious: "What about security updates? What about bug fixes? A 90-day delay is untenable!" This is the core tension Safe-NPM forces us to confront. The tool explicitly prioritizes defense against malicious *additions* over immediate access to benign *fixes*.

Proponents argue this is a rational trade-off:

• Critical Security Patches: For true, critical CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), the 90-day rule can be overridden with an explicit --force flag. This allows for emergency updates but requires a conscious, auditable decision to bypass the safeguard.
• Feature Updates: The vast majority of updates in the fast-moving JS world are non-critical feature additions or minor fixes. Waiting 90 days for these carries minimal risk compared to the catastrophic risk of a supply chain attack.
• Shift in Mindset: Safe-NPM challenges the default behavior of always installing latest. It encourages pinning to known-good, older versions and treating updates as deliberate events that require verification, not automatic reflexes.

Beyond the Tool: A Symptom of a Broken Trust Model

The rise of a tool like Safe-NPM is a damning indictment of the current state of open-source software supply chains. It highlights that the foundational model of implicit trust in package maintainers and registry integrity has cracked. When the official update channel itself becomes the primary attack vector, the entire workflow must be rethought.

Safe-NPM represents a specific school of thought: risk reduction through latency. It doesn't try to solve the impossible problem of determining intent (is this update good or evil?). It solves the simpler, more tractable problem of timing (has this update existed long enough for the community to spot evil?). It outsources the initial vetting to the passage of time and the collective attention of the ecosystem.

Other complementary approaches include:

• Software Bill of Materials (SBOM): For inventory, not prevention.
• Resource-intensive and can miss novel attacks.
• Registry Signing & Verification (like Sigstore): Excellent for verifying authorship, but doesn't stop a compromised maintainer.

Safe-NPM sits alongside these, not as a silver bullet, but as a pragmatic, coarse-grained filter that addresses the most urgent threat pattern of 2024-2025.

Should You Use It? Practical Implications

For individual developers and organizations, adopting Safe-NPM requires a calculated decision.

Ideal use cases include:

• Internal applications and backend services where running slightly older, stable dependencies is acceptable.
• Projects with a mature dependency tree, not those relying on cutting-edge, weekly-updated frameworks.
• As a training tool to instill more cautious update habits in development teams.

Challenging scenarios:

• Front-end projects dependent on rapidly-evolving UI frameworks or toolchains (e.g., Vite, Next.js plugins).
• Startups in "move fast" mode where new library features provide direct competitive advantages.
• Environments with strict compliance requirements mandating immediate patching of all known vulnerabilities.

The tool is open-source and new. Its long-term viability will depend on community adoption, configuration flexibility (e.g., allowing different age thresholds per package or dependency type), and integration with existing DevOps pipelines.

The Bottom Line: A Necessary Shock to the System

Safe-NPM won't be the right tool for every project, and its 90-day rule may seem extreme. But its real value isn't necessarily in widespread adoption of this specific implementation. Its value is in the stark, uncomfortable question it forces the entire industry to ask: Why have we built systems where installing brand-new, untested code from the internet is the default, and where doing so can bankrupt a company in under 24 hours?

In the ongoing arms race against supply chain attackers, tools like Safe-NPM represent a tactical retreat to more defensible ground. It sacrifices the allure of "latest and greatest" for the safety of "battle-tested and community-vetted." In a quarter where over a million projects were hit, that trade-off no longer looks radical—it looks rational. The next step is for the ecosystem to build upon this concept, creating more nuanced, automated, and intelligent ways to slow down the attack cycle without grinding innovation to a halt.