English

GoLeash: Mitigating Golang Software Supply Chain Attacks with Runtime Policy Enforcement

Cryptography and Security 2025-05-21 v1 Software Engineering

Abstract

Modern software supply chain attacks consist of introducing new, malicious capabilities into trusted third-party software components, in order to propagate to a victim through a package dependency chain. These attacks are especially concerning for the Go language ecosystem, which is extensively used in critical cloud infrastructures. We present GoLeash, a novel system that applies the principle of least privilege at the package-level granularity, by enforcing distinct security policies for each package in the supply chain. This finer granularity enables GoLeash to detect malicious packages more precisely than traditional sandboxing that handles security policies at process- or container-level. Moreover, GoLeash remains effective under obfuscation, can overcome the limitations of static analysis, and incurs acceptable runtime overhead.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.11016,
  title  = {GoLeash: Mitigating Golang Software Supply Chain Attacks with Runtime Policy Enforcement},
  author = {Carmine Cesarano and Martin Monperrus and Roberto Natella},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.11016},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:35:37.748Z