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detecting-typosquatting-packages

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Flag misspelled, brandjacked, and typosquatted package names across npm, PyPI, and crates.io before installation, using edit-distance, keyboard-proximity, and known-target corpus matching with typomania, Microsoft OSSGadget's oss-find-squats, and pypi-scan. Use before adding a new dependency, as a CI/CD gate on pull requests, when reviewing an AI-generated ("slopsquatting") dependency list, or when auditing a lockfile diff for a swapped package.

skills/detecting-typosquatting-packages/SKILL.md

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# Detecting Typosquatting Packages

> **Authorized Use Only:** This skill is for defensive software-supply-chain security, package screening, and authorized research. Use the corpus-matching and registry-query techniques here only against registries you are permitted to query at scale and packages you intend to evaluate for your own organization. Mass automated registry scraping may violate registry terms of service.

## Overview

Typosquatting is a software-supply-chain attack (MITRE ATT&CK **T1195.002 — Supply Chain Compromise: Compromise Software Supply Chain**) in which an adversary publishes a malicious package whose name is a near-miss of a popular legitimate package — `reqeusts` for `requests`, `python-sqlite` for `sqlite3`, `crossenv` for `cross-env`. A developer who fat-fingers the name, copies a name from a poisoned tutorial, or trusts an AI-generated dependency list (the "slopsquatting" variant, where models hallucinate package names attackers then register) installs the squat instead. Because most ecosystems execute install-time scripts (`postinstall` in npm, `setup.py`/build hooks in PyPI), the payload runs immediately with the developer's privileges.

This skill covers proactive, pre-installation detection: screening a candidate package name against a corpus of popular/known-good names using the same name-mutation primitives attackers use, then triaging high-risk matches. The canonical open-source detector is **typomania** (Rust Foundation), a Rust port of the academic **typogard** tool ("Defending Against Package Typosquatting", University of Kansas); typomania powers crates.io's live typosquatting checks. Cross-ecosystem coverage comes from **Microsoft OSSGadget's `oss-find-squats`** and, for PyPI, **IQTLabs `pypi-scan`**. The ecosyste-ms **typosquatting-dataset** provides a curated ground-truth corpus of known squats mapped to their legitimate targets.

Sources: Rust Foundation `typomania` (https://github.com/rustfoundation/typomania), Microsoft OSSGadget, ecosyste-ms typosquatting-dataset, and OWASP CI/CD / SLSA supply-chain guidance.

## When to Use

- Before adding a new dependency to `package.json`, `requirements.txt`, `pyproject.toml`, or `Cargo.toml`
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