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-sys crates are just bindings and doing something else in them is highly suspect. The rest I recognize as being owned by a Rust maintainer like alexcrichton or rustlang itself.

by nextaccountic8 hours ago|

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> The rest I recognize as being owned by a Rust maintainer like alexcrichton

The issue here isn't Alex Crichton going rogue, but rather, some malware stealing his credentials to use them to publish more malware in crates.io

In this sense, the more well known and upstanding Rust developer, the higher the risk they will be targeted by such operations

by b40d-48b2-979e8 hours ago|

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With crates.io using GH as its IdP, I think there would be much farther reaching consequences to account pwning in that scenario. I agree, though, that the security model for crates.io is only as strong as the weakest link there, and would pray someone like Alex is using physical tokens or the like for his MFA and can't be conned by a well-crafted email.

by duped10 hours ago|

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sys crates are also mostly generated and lack a lot of eyeballs. Sneaking something into the build.rs of a sys crate would not be difficult and would land in the builds of everything downstream of it.

by b40d-48b2-979e8 hours ago|

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    would not be difficult

Surely that's why we see evidence of all these build script attacks, since it's so easy?

by jchw7 hours ago|

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I had pondered the same thing about other package ecosystems in the past, in general. Now with the benefit of hindsight we can comfortably say that the absence of known (!) attacks doesn't really say anything about how relatively difficult an attack would be. Are -sys crates, or build script attacks, particularly potent? Who knows. When I did a cursory search, the only attempts I saw were at runtime rather than build time[1]. Which raises a good point; pwning a developer machine or CI box with a build script may be quite valuable, but if you might get that and prod with a runtime exploit, is the build time exploit that much more valuable? Guess it depends! (Of course, I personally think having at least optional build time sandboxing is even better than hoping it won't be valuable to attack.)

Of course, crates.io has surely had some malicious packages. (I'd assume it isn't all that unlikely there could be some undiscovered right now; it's definitely large enough for something like that to slip under the radar, even if it is relatively small compared to say, NPM.) But, I think it really hasn't had its XZ backdoor moment, its left-pad, where you really get to see how well it does or doesn't handle a serious challenge. Since I have actually not published on crates.io, I'm not really sure how the security posture is, but if it's more similar to other programming language repositories than it is to Linux repos, I dunno exactly why it would be hard to believe a high-level compromise is possible and could slip in (really, anywhere, be it a build script or otherwise.). Of course, "would not be difficult" is all relative. I'm sure many of these attacks are not really all that simple, but a lot of them aren't exactly groundbreaking either. It was well executed and took quite a lot of time, sure, but there wasn't all that much about the XZ backdoor that was novel. (Except maybe the slyness with which the payload was hidden in test files. That was pretty cool.)

[1]: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/09/24/crates.io-malicious-cr...