🛡️ MAL-2026-5906 — chai-plugin-kit

Malicious code in chai-plugin-kit (npm)

Source: amazon-inspector

Package republishes the chai source tree under the confusable name chai-plugin-kit. The package's main entry (index.js) spawns a detached, stdio-silenced node subprocess running lib/chai/utils/addAssertion.js on every require('chai-plugin-kit'). That file is heavily obfuscated with obfuscator.io transforms (rotated 31-entry string array _0x4a30, custom base64 decoder _0x495d, hex-named identifiers, control-flow flattening) hiding an https GET to an attacker-controlled URL whose response body is passed to new Function('require', body) and immediately invoked with the real require — granting attacker-controlled JavaScript full Node API access (filesystem, network, child_process, env). The detached + unref + stdio:'ignore' pattern is deliberate evasion to hide the child process from the consuming developer. A legitimate chai plugin has no reason to fetch and eval remote code.