[flagged]
Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
61–70 of 529 posts
Re: Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a recent talk which explored this question (Dependency Cultures, by Richard Feldman): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E82ly38YEEQ Summary: it's cultural. Rust likely inherited the practice from Nodejs, who inherited it from Ruby. I think in Rust online spaces in particular there is also this undercurrent of "you're not smart enough to use certain parts of the language, so download libraries that handle that…
i'd like to welcome you to the hell that is c/c++ dependency management. Make? cmake? qmake? conf? autoconf? configure? autotools? submodules??? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
vcpkg is pretty good. cmake is complex but very flexible. just need an llm to help and it's pretty much solved (if your dep is in autopkg)
Re: Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
#63Why this still happens? Why after many previous supply-chain attacks maintainers of package repositories still allow anyone uploading packages and pushing updates without security audit?
Who is funding this security audit? Are folks supposed to volunteer their free time? It's a difficult coordination problem. The best folks have come up is to delay adopting new releases by a few days and hope your dependency is popular enough that a security firm audits it for you in that timespan. If you have enough money I suppose you can start employing llms to audit things for yourself.
Languages like Rust have sources of income to be able to finance such audit.
You don't need to audit all the crap is being uploaded right now. Only really necessary and widely-used packages should be managed in a centralized way, so, auditing all of them isn't that huge task.
Re: Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Rust is very much a schlong-measuring contest What? Its just a programming language. Go dependency free if you want. Or vendor everything. Nobody is forcing you to pull in 3rd party dependencies.
[flagged]
As a person who doesn't like Rust very much, no, it doesn't suck. Some of its features make some folks very excited for very right reasons, and evokes "Silver Bullet Syndrome" in others for all the wrong reasons.
People weaponizing Rust rewrites with permissive licenses is another problem, but it's not about the programming language itself.
Re: Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
#65> arrayref is a small crate of four macros. Why do so many languages fall into this horrible practice?
There was a recent talk which explored this question (Dependency Cultures, by Richard Feldman): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E82ly38YEEQ Summary: it's cultural. Rust likely inherited the practice from Nodejs, who inherited it from Ruby. I think in Rust online spaces in particular there is also this undercurrent of "you're not smart enough to use certain parts of the language, so download libraries that handle that…
The language also takes backwards compatibility very seriously, anything that goes into std "must be maintained forever". It is also argued that a large stdlib means the maintainers have less time to work on the language itself.
I understand not every language can have Go's amazing stdlib, but I would much prefer Pyhton's approach where every now and then some package/function from the stdlib gets deprecated/removed. Rust's 3rd party ecosystem is the worst thing from the language, worse than the compile times.
Re: Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
#66> arrayref is a small crate of four macros. Why do so many languages fall into this horrible practice?
The languages that have a poor standard library support have this issue and other languages encourage you to import tons of libraries to fix the problem. This is why Javascript and Typescript suffer from this the most and has little to nothing to do with "popularity" and likely 9/10 of these npm packages import an external library. Golang on the other-hand is just as popular and has a stronger standard library which…
I don't want to see a large standard library for Rust. If something is added to the standard library, then it is very difficult to change it afterwards because backwards compatibility.
It would be better to have blessed crates in crates.io. The Rust core team would release or audit them. If the blessed crates need breaking changes, it can be done by increasing their major semantic version number. That can't be done to the standard library.
Actually, there could be a "trust" level for crates: 1. blessed crates by the Rust core team, 2. trusted developers, 3. untrusted developers. Or something like that..
Re: Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
#67Doing software development outside of strict containerization, at the very least, looks increasingly prone to disaster. Yes, we can argue about the culture of package management (as some of us have with especially npm from day one), but it's done, and your colleagues or AI sidekicks cannot be trusted not to download whatever and try to build and run it. All you can do is limit the effective blast radius.
minimum-release-age
Re: Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
#68Are there any plans to more seriously develop the standard library in Rust? Or is the plan to remain in this status quo where users of Rust import nonsense and the dependency tree explodes (or users are forced to invent their own wheel?).
Are there any comparisons between the state of the stdlib in C++ vs. Rust? I’d think that would serve as an excellent jumping off point to start chipping away.
Re: Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
#69Re: Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
#70These very small dependencies that are then later causing issues either due to malicious nature or incompetence, have become pervasive in computing (for some reason). I think that these should be less of an issue now than ever. Outside of the largest, most critical dependencies, you really shouldn't be pulling in small libraries anymore. Just generate the code via AI. AI is not great at large scale programming I thin…
[deleted]