Risky Bulletin: Academics find source code overlaps between Geedge and China's Great Firewall
Academics linked Chinese vendor Geedge Networks' Tiangou Secure Gateway source code to one of the Great Firewall's three traffic filtering capabilities.
US researchers presenting at USENIX Security reconstructed Geedge Networks' Tiangou Secure Gateway firmware from over 100,000 leaked files, including Git repositories with commit history, and matched its filtering behavior to sections of China's Great Firewall. They found only 1 of 3 characterized DNS injectors matched Geedge code, noted the system relies on memory-unsafe C components and copied third-party code, and said its bugs could aid future circumvention tools. Geedge also exports censorship tools to Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Myanmar. The newsletter additionally rounds up multiple breaches.
Package Manager Trends
Sixteen-week roundup finds package managers converging on release-age cooldowns, install-script blocking, malware scans, and recurring path-traversal and credential-leak fixes.
The author aggregates supply-chain security trends from sixteen weeks of This Week in Package Management, built from about 80 RSS feeds. Release-age cooldown gates shipped in Deno 2.8, Bundler, npm, Yarn, mise, Hex, Mamba, and Cargo, with Dependabot making a three-day cooldown default in August. npm 12 and Bun 1.4 now block lifecycle install scripts by default, and Composer 2.10 and uv added install/publish-time malware checks, while npm's registry began scanning at publish time. Path traversal on archive extraction was fixed in 14 of 16 weeks across tools including uv, pnpm, Docker, and Composer, and credential-misdirection bugs affected Cargo, ORAS, Composer, and Renovate.