Yeah thanks for saying this; I agree. And as cliche as it is to look for a technical solution to a social problem, I also think better tools could help a lot here.
The current situation is ridiculous - if I pull in a compression library from npm, cargo or Python, why can that package interact with my network, make syscalls (as me) and read and write files on my computer? Leftpad shouldn’t be able to install crypto ransomware on my computer.
To solve that, package managers should include capability based security. I want to say “use this package from cargo, but refuse to compile or link into my binary any function which makes any syscall except for read and write. No open - if I want to compress or decompress a file, I’ll open the file myself and pass it in.” No messing with my filesystem. No network access. No raw asm, no trusted build scripts and no exec. What I allow is all you get.
The capability should be transitive. All dependencies of the package should be brought in under the same restriction.
In dynamic languages like (server side) JavaScript, I think this would have to be handled at runtime. We could add a capability parameter to all functions which issue syscalls (or do anything else that’s security sensitive). When the program starts, it gets an “everything” capability. That capability can be cloned and reduced to just the capabilities needed. (Think, pledge). If I want to talk to redis using a 3rd party library, I pass the redis package a capability which only allows it to open network connections. And only to this specific host on this specific port.
It wouldn’t stop all security problems. It might not even stop this one. But it would dramatically reduce the attack surface of badly behaving libraries.