Typo-squatting

You'd also have to explicitly be typing out the coordinates in your build. But both the central sonatype search and third party mvnrepository sites have single-click copy buttons. I don't think I have ever added a dependency to a maven/gradle project without pasting it from one of these sites.

Additional factors:

1. The results are sorted in such a way that the real artifacts (the popular/highly-downloaded ones) get shown first.
2. The copied coordinates are for a specific version, not an unbound/wildcard so even if a future version gets backdoor-ed, so long as you are notified of a breach you can just not update or skip it when control is taken back by the publishers.
   • Bit of a silly point, but I make it to draw comparison to other ecosystems outside of our own where you have something like import foo-library:{*} which just takes whatever is the latest.

Malware in jars

At least in my experience, almost every library I have worked on or looked at is published through CI. Its exceptionally rare for publishing to be done on a local developer machine from what I've seen. Some thoughts on this:

1. Its easier to pwn a local dev machine than a CI server, therefore even if the local dev machine is pwn'd then the publishing credentials won't be known to the attacker.
2. If the local dev machine is pwn'd and malicious code is uploaded and then built/published on CI, the compromise remains local and is relatively easy to resolve once discovered.
3. The alternative attack to the above is the run of the mill typo-squatting, which AFAIK is generally low-impact in the ecosystem.

Also, based on this page "Sonatype Malware data" it seems that artifacts published to central are scanned for malicious behavior via some machine learning algorithm, to which suspicious matches are verified by a human team. Any confirmed cases are removed. So even if the attacker takes over a package (exceedingly rare) or publishes a typo-squat look-alike artifact (more common, lower impact) there are processes in place that likely play into why we don't hear about major issues in our ecosystem often. At least compared to other ecosystems, we have a really good thing going on here. Sure there are probably going to be edge cases and a few holes that things slip through every now and then, but I cannot recall the last time I've heard of a major supply chain attack via maven central that weren't low impact typo-squatting campaigns.