GitHub on Monday announced that it will be changing its authentication and publishing options "in the near future" in response to a recent wave of supply chain attacks targeting the npm ecosystem, including the Shai-Hulud attack. This includes steps to address threats posed by token abuse and self-replicating malware by allowing local publishing with required two-factor authentication (2FA), granular tokens that will have a limited lifetime of seven days, and trusted publishing, which enables the ability to securely publish npm packages directly from CI/CD workflows using OpenID Connect (OIDC). Trusted publishing, besides eliminating the need for npm tokens, establishes cryptographic trust by authenticating each publish using short-lived, workflow-specific credentials that cannot be…