Beyond Takedown: Measuring Malicious Go Module Persistence in the Wild
This work highlights a critical blind spot in software supply chain security for the Go ecosystem, showing that GitHub-centric takedowns are insufficient and that malicious modules persist in proxies.
The paper measures an automation-based supply chain campaign in the Go ecosystem, identifying 2,289 malicious versions of legitimate Go modules. It reveals that 99.4% of GitHub-unobservable artifacts remained retrievable via Go proxy, and after disclosure, GitHub removed 684 repositories and Google remediated 1,377 module versions.
We measure an automation-based supply chain campaign in the Go ecosystem. The attackers repackage legitimate Go modules under attacker-controlled owners, and embed them with obfuscated code for an import-triggered downloader. Our results come from two complementary analyses: a) a manual search on GitHub across 2,113 repositories and b) a large-scale scan of 12.3M index entries using a deobfuscating AST scanner (GOAST) that we implemented. As a result, we identified 2,289 malicious versions of legitimate Go modules. We demonstrate that purely GitHub-centric searches fail to identify the full extent of the compromise and are only effective for as long as the affected code is present on the platform. Moreover, our proxy-based measurements of the takedown-remediation gap reveal that among artifacts later found to be GitHub-unobservable (i.e., removed or suspended), at least 99.4% remained retrievable via Go proxy. Following our disclosure, GitHub has removed 684 malicious repositories and the Google Go team has remediated 1,377 module versions.