One Detector Fits All: Robust and Adaptive Detection of Malicious Packages from PyPI to Enterprises

TL;DR

This paper presents a robust, adaptable detector for malicious Python packages that leverages adversarial training and fine-grained obfuscation, effective in both public repositories and enterprise environments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel adversarial package generation method and demonstrates a detector adaptable to different false positive requirements with real-world case studies.

Findings

Robustness increased by 2.5x with adversarial training

Detected 10% more obfuscated malicious packages

Achieved low false positive rates in real-world deployments

Abstract

The rise of supply chain attacks via malicious Python packages demands robust detection solutions. Current approaches, however, overlook two critical challenges: robustness against adversarial source code transformations and adaptability to the varying false positive rate (FPR) requirements of different actors, from repository maintainers (requiring low FPR) to enterprise security teams (higher FPR tolerance). We introduce a robust detector capable of seamless integration into both public repositories like PyPI and enterprise ecosystems. To ensure robustness, we propose a novel methodology for generating adversarial packages using fine-grained code obfuscation. Combining these with adversarial training (AT) enhances detector robustness by 2.5x. We comprehensively evaluate AT effectiveness by testing our detector against 122,398 packages collected daily from PyPI over 80 days, showing that AT needs careful application: it makes the detector more robust to obfuscations and allows finding 10% more obfuscated packages, but slightly decreases performance on non-obfuscated packages. We demonstrate production adaptability of our detector via two case studies: (i) one for PyPI maintainers (tuned at 0.1% FPR) and (ii) one for enterprise teams (tuned at 10% FPR). In the former, we analyze 91,949 packages collected from PyPI over 37 days, achieving a daily detection rate of 2.48 malicious packages with only 2.18 false positives. In the latter, we analyze 1,596 packages adopted by a multinational software company, obtaining only 1.24 false positives daily. These results show that our detector can be seamlessly integrated into both public repositories like PyPI and enterprise ecosystems, ensuring a very low time budget of a few minutes to review the false positives. Overall, we uncovered 346 malicious packages, now reported to the community.