Deleted dependency detected

[ashishbijlani]

I'm a Cyber Security researcher and developer of PackjGuard [1] to address open-source software supply chain attacks.

Issue

During my research, I found that this repo is vulnerable to attack due to deleted dependency from the public PyPI registry.

Details

Specifically, file https://github.com/akutzer/semantic-retrieval/blob/7db59447b8eb0c85b998b09c01feb9b1459d8003/retrieval/preprocessing/question_generation_gpt4free/requirements.txt lists MailGw-Temporary-Email as one of the dependencies. However, it has been deleted from public PyPI. As such, an external bad actor can claim that name and register a malicious package, which will be then installed with pip install command, resulting in arbitrary remote code execution.

Impact

Not only your apps/services using https://github.com/akutzer/semantic-retrieval repo code are vulnerable to this attack, but the users of your open-source Github repo could also fall victim.

You could read more about such attacks here: https://medium.com/@alex.birsan/dependency-confusion-4a5d60fec610

Remediation

Please manually register a placeholder MailGw-Temporary-Email package on PyPI immediately or remove MailGw-Temporary-Email dependency from https://github.com/akutzer/semantic-retrieval/blob/7db59447b8eb0c85b998b09c01feb9b1459d8003/retrieval/preprocessing/question_generation_gpt4free/requirements.txt to fix this vulnerability.

To automatically fix such issues in future, please install PackjGuard Github app [1].

Thanks!

1. PackjGuard is a Github app that monitors your repos 24x7, detects vulnerable/malicious/risky open-source dependencies, and creates pull requests for auto remediation: https://github.com/marketplace/packjguard