npm package security is one of the hardest parts of modern Node.js security because the npm ecosystem is massive. The npm registry has more than 2 million packages, making it the largest software registry in the world. That scale helps developers build quickly, but it also creates security risk: abandoned packages, vulnerable transitive dependencies, typosquatting, malicious releases, and supply chain attacks can enter an application through a single install command.

Most Node.js teams do not ship only the packages listed in package.json . The real dependency tree lives in package-lock.json , where direct and transitive packages are pinned. That file can include hundreds or thousands of packages.…