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Subtle Ways to Tell a Lie: Slopsquatting and Supply-Chain Security
By Angelica, Philippe
Threat Model Summary
An attacker registers a package name commonly hallucinated by AI code assistants, delivering malicious code to developers who execute copy-pasted recommendations.
Key Findings
- •AI code assistants consistently suggest plausible but non-existent package names when prompted for trendy or popular functionality.
- •Monitoring and pre-emptively registering these hallucinated package names (slopsquatting) allows attackers to execute targeted supply chain attacks.
- •Standard package registries lack validation for whether suggested imports are safe or verified, increasing importance of client-side guardrails.
Models Tested
qwen2.5-coderdeepseek-codercodellamaqwen2.5llama3.1
Taxonomy Tags
LLM01LLM02T1195.001
This report investigates the pre-conditions of slopsquatting: a supply-chain attack vector born from the systematic tendencies of Large Language Models to hallucinate non-existent software packages during code generation. Rather than relying on a hostile data path into an active system, this vulnerability exploits routine development workflows, becoming particularly pronounced when developers use trend-seeking language to prompt models for modern, popular, or recent ecosystem tools.