It's actually pretty easy to detect that something is obfuscated, but it's harder to prove that the obfuscated code is actually harmful. This is why we still have a team of humans review flagged packages before we try to get them taken down, otherwise you would end up with way too many false positives.

Yeah, what I meant is that obfuscation is a strong sign that something needs to be flagged for review. Sadly, there's only a thin line between obfuscation and minification, so I was wondering how many false positives you get.

Thanks for the links in your other comment, I'll take a look!

I think that would be static analysis. After processing the source code normally (looking for net & sys calls), you decode base64, concatenate all strings and process again (until decode makes no change)

Probably. It’s trivial to plug some obfuscated code into an LLM and ask it what it does.

Yeah, but just imagine how many false positives and false negatives there would be...