Given what a dumpster fire npm ecosystem is security wise, it's best to run the whole build chain in a container anyway, at least for frontend apps. This way you also don't care about the chosen package manager or node.js version - you can just set it as you wish in the Dockerfile. It does take more disk space though, but to me it's a nice compromise.
Containers don't provide much protection from malware, unless you're running it rootless under an unprivileged user (no sudo access, no ssh keys or anything else interesting in the home directory, etc; and even then it's limited because the attack surface is enormous).
I mean, of course? Especially, why would I put ssh keys and similar in the container?
This still doesn't mean that one can install just any package, but it does make it much more difficult for it to do much harm. Breaking out of a container is not as trivial as it once was. That said, it is not a perfect solution, so I'd be happy to hear of better ones. Any suggestions?
No ssh keys or anything else interesting available to the user you're running the container engine under (and containers themselves). Not the user _inside_ the container, but on the main system.
