HookAudit: Building a Supply-Chain Security Scanner Without a Supply Chain
What happens when you force a security tool to inspect untrusted code using only standard-library primitives? An engineering postmortem on systems complexity and zero dependencies. Opening Hook We were building a security scanner designed to inspect untrusted repositories before developers open them in their editors. Our first instinct was standard Node.js muscle memory: npm install commander…
HookAudit is a repository execution-topology security auditor that aims to inspect untrusted repositories before developers open them in their editors. The team initially considered using standard Node.js packages, but decided to remove all third-party dependencies to eliminate the risk of supply-chain compromises. This decision led to a descent into the raw systems complexity that libraries normally hide, such as operating system path boundary traps, binary Git object serialization, and subtle bugs in directed graph traversals.
The project's five-stage workflow includes discovering configured execution surfaces, detecting commands and flags, tracing references, analyzing reachable capabilities, and establishing an integrity baseline. The execution graph is the central artifact of the system, and the tool relies on Node.js built-ins for runtime execution.
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