And the comment is:
// ShellExecute via WScript escapes Cargo's job object; spawned children otherwise
// keep the build script (and `cargo build`) waiting until they exit.
Would it be gauche to speculate? Maybe some script kiddy sweet-talked Fable into dropping its safeguards, or maybe Anthropic is doing a training run for Fable 5.1 and the air-gaps aren’t gapping.
The bad package version has also just disappeared from crates.io [2] with no indication its been yanked. There's no security advisory there either [3] "No advisories found for this crate."
I feel crates.io was unprepared for a security incident like this since they're managing the response [4]
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260820145918/https://github.co...
[2]: https://crates.io/crates/arrayref/versions
[3]: https://crates.io/crates/arrayref/security (I'd give an Wayback link but that's also broken https://web.archive.org/web/20260820150747/https://crates.io...)
[4]: https://github.com/rustsec/advisory-db/issues/3161#issuecomm...
So, yanked crate versions do have an indication on crates.io. (Here's an example: [1]) The Rust blog post uses the word "deleted", and I'm guessing a bit here, but I think they mean that literally, and that the version here is deleted, not yanked. And I think that would be more appropriate: a yanked crate is still downloadable by cargo, if your lockfile is locked to it already; yanking only prevents lockfiles from newly automatically acquiring a lock on that version. That wouldn't be desirable in the case of a compromised crate: you don't want a download occurring at all. The tradeoff of "break those with locks on the crate" tips to being worth it.
That said, I agree with you, though: I think this state (if it is "deleted" and not yanked) should be plainly indicated on the crate's versions page. (Even better would be if it came with a link to, e.g., the blog post or a RUSTSEC so that you could find out why.) (& I think perhaps the docs for yank should point out whether or not it is appropriate in the "compromised crate" scenario, and if not, what to do instead.)
Sure you do; you just don’t want the crate to be made available to people trying to make use of the crate as regular downstream consumers. You still want the crate available for download for analysis. You especially want to be able to deterministically reproduce the vulnerable version of your software that you already built.
I would posit that most package ecosystems should treat “contains an exploit” as its own package state; mostly ignore them; but still be aware of their existence.
In other words, if there’s any other non-exploited option under your version constraints, the dep should resolve to the nearest non-exploited version, even if older. But if it’s the only version, or if you have pinned the exploited version, then the packager should see it, but normally refuse to interact with it—i.e. refuse to lock to it if it’s the only version; or refuse to fetch it if it’s the locked version.
I say “normally” because you should be able to bypass this with a flag / env-var to the packager that basically means “I’m building this for forensic analysis, not for running.”
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/02/13/crates.io-malicious-cr...
Not having an advisory INSTANTLY available isn't a sign of a decaying org. Chill.
We shouldn't need to resort to pasting `find` commands [1] into the shell from blog posts to tell if we're compromised.
`cargo audit` should be reporting if these packages have been downloaded. The "What you need to do" section of the blog should be run `cargo audit`
> Not having an advisory INSTANTLY available isn't a sign of a decaying org. Chill.
The GitHub issue was opened 8 hours ago. The cargo.io team also acknowledged it 8 hours ago. [2]
> [3] is no longer true.
Previously published versions shouldn't just disappear from the list. There's still nothing there to indicate a version was yanked.
[1]: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/08/20/supply-chain-attack-on...
[2]: https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/318791-t-cra...
I know you recommended `cargo audit`, but that is not nearly as universally installed as `find`. And as far as I know, cargo-audit has to be run within a project directory? Can it be run outside of the context of a project and scan the cargo registry cache?
I personally appreciated having the `find` command:
* It very clearly indicates where to look (my cargo registry cache)
* It very clearly indicates what files to look for (a list of wildcards)
* It's something that I can easily review and then copy/paste into my terminal
* I can very easily adapt it to my particular environment (perhaps into a `fd` invocation if I'm on Windows, or perhaps adapt it to scan all home directories on my system), or feed these file names into some other vulnerability scanner
You'd obviously already have cargo installed, which means you should be able to run a command against cargo to see if you are currently exposed to any security problems. Even if it's not the current "audit" add on.
They did that because a yanked package can still be used. And in this case there weren't any downloads, so it is unlikely the malicious package was actually used.
How to call it then : Yanked hard vs yanked soft ?
> A new version of the arrayref crate was published with a direct dependency on proc-macro1, which would execute a malicious build script.
> This compromised version was published on 2026-08-20 and removed approximately 86 minutes later, with no evidence of actual usage.
I don't know what more you want. Do you want the malicious version to continue to be available?
The version page [1] should show that for 86 minutes there was a version 0.3.10, it was malicious and was deleted with a link to the advisory. I get this takes time so even a generic "deleted" entry until they have time to link in the advisory would also be fine so we know something is happening.
Presumably even "deleted" crate versions still have some metadata left behind in the backend so this should be surfaced.
Google should read this too. They simply remove Android apps and Chrome extensions without a single word. No page explaining why they removed it, if i was at risk.
HTTP/1.1 309 Security Advisory
Location: https://acme/aaargh-another-advisoryI can very easily build a highly functional, pleasant to use Apple platform app with 5 or fewer top level dependencies. In many cases, I reach for between 0-2 total.
There’s no reason why this can’t be replicated elsewhere. The key is to make the programming language reasonably robust with at least 80% of common non-UI dev needs built in and put the remaining 20% and UI bits into a small family of well-supported, community-embraced, preferably first party libraries.
That would make it unnecessary to pull in foreign dependencies in the overwhelming majority of projects. What few do get pulled in becomes lightweight, easily verifiable syntactic sugar or libraries with purposes too niche to be worth targeting.
Of course this approach can go wrong too. You could easily end up with a monster like Boost, but that comes down to project administration keeping creep under control and proper modular design.
I think Go apps tend to have better dependency hygiene because the language has a better standard library, which results in better culture around dependencies.
I also think it’s frustrating that both cargo and npm totally ignore the decades of prior art from Linux distributions that have figured out good ways to improve dependency management. We’d be in better shape if there was a community curated subset of known-good dependencies that are release-managed together that the broader ecosystem could build on, sort of like Ubuntu having “main” and “universe”.
Certainly having a larger stdlib helps Go projects keep their deps down, but I don't think it's the real reason.
One of the core tenets of early Go was the maxim "a little copying is better than a little dependency".
Probably because of this stance, they didn't even HAVE a dependency-management solution for years
I strongly agree the fewer dependencies the better, on average.
Culture has a lot to do with it.
The big reason is money & time. Maybe less so today if you are happy with an AI generated stdlib, but I don't think it's fair to compare Rust (built by Mozilla, who's primary product is an open source web browser) to Swift/AppKit (built by Apple, 4.6T marketcap at the time of writing).
When Go was released it had an amazing stdlib, but that was because Google was funding it.
Swift was intended from the start to not only replace Objective-C and all of its use cases, but also take on new use cases and bring a number of features from other languages that were newer and had different dominant paradigms.
Certainly having a juggernaut like Apple behind it has been instrumental in its success in achieving those goals. That said, a community-lead project with similar aims could probably achieve those aims as well, given enough time.
I think it's just rare for enthusiast-led projects to set out to do such things. My theory on why things tend to go that way is that the types of people to start programming language projects tend to heavily lean nuts-and-bolts and theory with a purist/idealist sort of mentality that's more concerned ideological purity than practical usability.
So to sum this all up, a community-run practical, multi-purpose, batteries-included language likely needs to at least partially designed and helmed by product engineer types so it doesn't end up anemic and stuck in an ideological rut.
Look at C++'s long in the tooth STL.
You don't want to marry a language to fast aging libraries you have to support for eternity. Better libraries always naturally emerge.
Rust's decision here is fine.
The only thing I'd like to see is the ability to programmatically limit transitive dependency count or depth in Cargo. I'd also like crates to specify whether they limit their own deps and whether they have panick-y behavior or not.
Huge standard libraries make sense for Java, Go, Apple platform etc. because they are developed by giant enterprises that can manage the overhead. Thinner modular systems are a more natural fit for open source development.
While overhead is a real concern, I think it’s often blown out of proportion. Once a language achieves a certain baseline of stability and isn’t in constant flux and the standard library matures, changes become infrequent and maintenance load is low. The work is heavily front-loaded.
> There’s no reason why this can’t be replicated elsewhere. The key is to make the programming language reasonably robust with at least 80% of common non-UI dev needs built in and put the remaining 20% and UI bits into a small family of well-supported, community-embraced, preferably first party libraries.
I wholeheartedly agree. Most standard libraries out there (when I say most I easily mean of 99% languages that I know) have pitifully tiny implementations. They at most provide for string parsing, io, a bare networking layer (that's at best a wrapper around the POSIX syscalls), threading and that's it. If you want to do anything more complex, you either have to roll it yourself or use an assortment of the "blessed libs" for any given language, that may or may not work properly, and may or may not even work well with each other. I got pissed off by this at some point so I decided to go ahead and roll my own standard lib that would actually have everything I need to.. actually develop apps. Now I know most people probably aren't going to be using it (mainly because its functional API isn't what most C++ devs want) but for me it's actually been brilliant.
They do not want a big stdlib. The downsides are real (the stdlib cannot make breaking changes), and there are no upsides (except, maybe, for faster compilation, since std comes precompiled).
They want more official crates (e.g. `regex` and `libc` are official crates, maintained by the Rust project). And the Rust project does not oppose to that, it just doesn't have the funding.
I can use most of the clunky Python, Java, .NET and if it must be, Go, standard libraries, than hunting down for dependencies with platform tier support and such.
We also have the classic example of PHP with numerous not safe stdlib ways to use mysql.
To me the answer is still to vendor your dependencies and don't be on the bleeding edge of updates unless you're willing to invest the time into validating them.
I think it goes without saying that emulating PHP is rarely a good decision.
What is your critique of their approach? Is it not the case that `go get` is the only one which doesn't even provide a way for the person downloading to run the downloaded code until it is actually executed by the consuming codebase? That seems pretty sound by comparison.
I guess you're saying, "they had to" meaning they should've seen the need and provided it? I'll say this to that (imagined) take; plenty of useful software was made without it, and they got the job done when they knew the absolute most about what a good solution would need. I totally understand being annoyed at the fact that this is the story of every evolution in Go, but I genuinely think they're picking good implementations when they decide on them.
It’s half arsed, brittle and far from user friendly.
> Is it not the case that `go get` is the only one which doesn't even provide a way for the person downloading to run the downloaded code until it is actually executed by the consuming codebase?
If you’ve added the package to your imported then odds are your next step is going to build it. Thus negating any benefit.
I think the real issue is malicious packages entering package ecosystems. Whether your package manage executes on downloads or not is moot because you’ve still got untrusted code sat in your project imports, just waiting to be accidentally executed.
> I guess you're saying, "they had to" meaning they should've seen the need and provided it? I'll say this to that (imagined) take; plenty of useful software was made without it, and they got the job done when they knew the absolute most about what a good solution would need. I totally understand being annoyed at the fact that this is the story of every evolution in Go.
I think you’re being too charitable here. I think Russ Cox just didn’t want a package manager because C doesn’t have one. But ended up relenting after everyone nagged the Go team for years afterwards.
And really what they built was the bare minimum to manage package version pinning and updates. But it has none of the visibility that central package repositories have. So how do you know if a Go package has been compromised when the only source of truth is the compromised origin?
I don't think automatic updating is a good idea at all. It's just the honor-system, and trust is a security flaw.
> If you’ve added the package to your imported then odds are your next step is going to build it. Thus negating any benefit.
I actually think this is the benefit! I don't need to go to a website to see what changed, I can just have a look at the code. The best dependencies have a changelog. Ideally I can look at a diff.
> I think you’re being too charitable here. I think Russ Cox just didn’t want a package manager because C doesn’t have one. But ended up relenting after everyone nagged the Go team for years afterwards.
That's entirely possible.
> So how do you know if a Go package has been compromised when the only source of truth is the compromised origin?
Fair point, and probably worse in this future we're in now that NIST is drowning in CVEs and has turned away from some share of them.
If Odin gets moderately successful someone will probably reinvent it.
It was only when people wanted a common approach to shipping both in browser and "native" that this glitch happened. I believe a standard library and "batteries" would have abated it entirely or resulted in a slightly less-bad situation. I do think Cargo is a slightly less-bad situation in many ways, and that it can be done better.
Batteries also don't help if dependencies don't replace them. Arrayref functionality has been part of Rust std lib for a while now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZOuz-SG7-g
Funny how you skipped "I should build my own batteries" and when straight to "increasing and centralizing the duties of your main gratis 'vendor'".
I'm happy to contribute to a larger effort but anything I can build on my own is going to be a thin, flimsy happy meal toy compared to something with the backing of a company or well organized FOSS project.
Also the challenge of building a generic module is much larger than building your own. A generic module needs to have flexibility for many different options and integrations, when you build your own you build just what you need and tightly integrate it with the product
Direct post link: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/08/20/supply-chain-attack-on...
Initial report: https://github.com/rustsec/advisory-db/issues/3161
Other vendor posts:
* https://www.stepsecurity.io/blog/arrayref-rust-crate-supply-...
* https://research.jfrog.com/post/arrayref-proc-macro1-crates-...
* https://www.aikido.dev/blog/two-popular-rust-crates-arrayref...
¹ https://rust-lang.github.io/goals/2024h2/sandboxed-build-scr...
I think we may need to enter a world where there are fewer, heavily audited, libraries and dependency depth is limited. Allowing unvetted dependencies to be installed by default is not a good way forward. App stores have a similar problem and I think a lot of lessons have been learned there that can be applied.
Here is my learning building PMG:
Sandboxing is good when the workload is predictable, and the goal of sandbox is to guard against exploitation of vulnerabilities, like sandbox protecting chrome tabs (renderers). But unfortunately build scripts are not predictable, at least not in npm/pypi world and I have seen build scripts doing weirdest of the things which is no different from malware. When popular packages do weird things, build breaks and users end up turning off the sandbox. This is a perpetual problem to deal with while building sandbox (or any least privilege solution) to protect unbounded workloads.
It isn't so much a question of sandboxing build.rs, as fundamentally changing the way that foreign dependencies are integrated into the rust toolchain (i.e. moving from a rust-centric system like Cargo to something more general like buck2)
To solve the problem of native/C dependencies, they just bundle pre-compiled libraries as data files.
Rust could do the same thing.
Any C library that's also packaged by debian supports being built under these conditions because it's required for everything except non-free packages: https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-source.html#main...
As the link you posted mentions, you need a tiny bit more than that: you also need write access to the temporary directory (/tmp and similar). Many build tools temporarily store files there; for instance, unless things have changed since I last looked, if you don't use the -pipe argument the C compiler stores its temporary intermediate files (preprocessor output, assembler input) there.
Which is the result of how bad dependency managment is outside (i.e. DLL-hell).
Pretty much all other use cases of build.rs can be sandboxed. Well, there is sqlx that wants to connect to database at expansion time to compile check-queries (yew).
Although I suppose that's still doing a lot of shenanigans at compile time. It could be sandboxed pretty well (theoretically). I'd hate to give it up completely though, getting a compile time error when SELECT query params or return values have type mismatches is extremely nice.
I would argue that, if a build script doesn’t work in the setting, then it doesn’t deserve to be installable by a default cargo command.
This seems like an excuse, not an actual objection.
Linux can do seccomp or Landlock or gVisor or a combination. Seccomp and gVisor need no privileges. Windows has its internal weird mechanisms. Mac has sandbox-exec.
Cargo could easily pick an appropriate sandbox for each major platform and ship it by default.
> If you only care about Unix, then you can do this yourself today by building code in your sandbox of choice.
This is ridiculous. The sandbox should not have network access, but cargo needs network access to download the package in the first place.
It would be a big pain for many that are in the unfortunate position to really need build scripts, though.
Cargo, please PLEASE give me a way to disable third-party build.rs and whitelist the ones I need. And please loudly mark any update that adds a build.rs where there was none before.
See https://embarkstudios.github.io/cargo-deny/checks/bans/cfg.h...
Audit and limit crates (cargo-deny &| cargo-crev, && --offline) until tools exist to audit build.rs safety semi-automatically ($$ safeguard.sh maybe).
The root problem is two parts:
1. crates.io doesn't do mandatory curation. Lack of curation is fail. It's time-consuming and costly for reviewers without a doubt, but so is letting an ecosystem gain maximum entropy (go to shit) by Tragedy of the Commons depending entirely on the honor system. Name squatting, low-quality, unmaintained, typosquatting, and malware are the consequences of too much self-service / semi-self-service freedom.
2. Many, many cargo subcommands are over-eager to run build.rs because it assumes trusted crates:
In an untrusted/uncurated crates world and a build.rs exists or exists in a selected dependency, it shouldn't run at cargo-add time (unless it must). If it exists, on first run, it should be presented to the user in a viewer for manual review unless a magic CLI flag/env var is specified to accept it.
These 2 factors combined appear to create a Swiss cheese holes failure mode for running arbitrary crate `cargo add`. I have confidence a suitable add-in workflow &| standard command &| repository workflow will be adjusted to reduce the attack surface of the ecosystem.
The vast majority of crates don't need build scripts, so it is vaguely feasible to audit the list of crates you use that might need them.
(Oh and btw, proc macros also run arbitrary code.)
Also most of these dependencies provide a breadth of features that the end package does probably not need.
Downloaded by_address v1.2.1
Downloaded block-buffer v0.12.1
Downloaded block-padding v0.4.2
Downloaded adler2 v2.0.1
Downloaded color_quant v1.1.0
Downloaded blowfish v0.10.0
Downloaded byteorder v1.5.0
Downloaded bytemuck_derive v1.12.0
Downloaded futures-sink v0.3.34
Downloaded bs58 v0.5.1
Downloaded critical-section v1.2.0
Downloaded fnv v1.0.7
Downloaded bytemuck v1.25.2
Downloaded form_urlencoded v1.2.2
Downloaded futures-macro v0.3.34
Downloaded futures-io v0.3.34
Downloaded blake2 v0.11.0-rc.6
Downloaded find-msvc-tools v0.1.11
Downloaded funty v2.0.0
Downloaded fdlimit v0.3.0
Downloaded ff v0.14.0
Downloaded foldhash v0.2.0
Downloaded bon v3.9.3
Downloaded fdeflate v0.3.7
Downloaded darling_core v0.23.0
Downloaded bon-macros v3.9.3I think the sweet spot is having an ecosystem of "blessed" libraries that are reviewed for security and quality, but are versioned independently of the language, and maintained by subject matter experts.
It provides sandboxing for arbitrary CLI commands using Seatbelt / SBPL on macOS and Landlock LSM + seccomp-bpf on Linux. You can use it to protect local dependency builds, or integrate it into GitHub Actions to add an extra layer of protection to CI.
Feel free to give it a try — I’d love to hear your feedback.
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.
Many things I run I want to limit to r/w a single dir, and to have to request permission to make network calls.
1. There isn’t a single universal standard for sandboxing across all the different platforms that are supported by Rust.
2. Even if there were, if you’re compiling untrusted code then why would you trust the built output?
If you’re building the create then I’d argue that any preventative steps afterwards is akin to closing the barn door after the horse has already bolted.
I said OS level. It's something I should easily be able to do via the OS capabilities that would work for rust, npm, etc.
I would use it not only for rust builds but for nearly every app on my computer.
Yeah, let's hold up the entire world of offensive cybersecurity capability while you work on that. Sure they will wait.
> 2. Even if there were, if you’re compiling untrusted code then why would you trust the built output?
You don't. You sandbox the hell out of it too.
In the mean time I think it's possible to hack Cargo and run all build scripts in a microVM. The blast radius will be limited to malicious code in the binary instead of uploading all your CI secrets and deleting the whole hard drive.
The thing is, trust is a massive optimization. If you believe code from X is competently made and not malicious, you can accept that code without any additional overhead. (Building trust is a significant effort, but trust begets trust, so there's a resonable path from starting small to scaling.)
It's not that these mechanisms that require less trust (none of them eliminate it, BTW, when you examine them) can't work. It's that they'll inevitably be outcompeted by trust-based systems (in most domains).
E.g., compare the effort of creating a new, full featured, general purpose language, promoting it, building and maintaining all the tooling and documentation around it to support it, etc to the effort of creating and maintaining a curated package repository of trusted packages (and/or adding trusted code to extend the standard library) for existing language X.
(It's not clear to me you could provide enough value from a new language focused on effects that you could convince any but a few from adopting it at all, even if it dropped from the sky fully formed with all tools, docs, etc. in place from day one.)
It's not the only way. You can sandbox processes. I think sandboxing is the much more reasonable approach, because in the end of the day, there are still closed-source software products where you can't demand that the manufacturers use certain language safety features.
So if your software needs to make HTTP requests and read the filesystem then the malware will be able to make HTTP requests and read the filesystem, which is enough for a ton of malware. Sure, maybe you can limit the directories it can access a bit and possibly some sort of network filtering, but it isn't a silver bullet.
Capability security in-language would make a huge difference, because the more granular you "sandbox" the less likely it is that the compromised component has the access it wants. For example if the HTTP client library is compromised maybe it can't access the filesystem so can't steal your cookies. Or maybe like in this case no permissions were needed at all and despite the process having enough capabilities for malware this malware can at worst return bad values and try to chain this to an exploit which is far more difficult than just running it itself.
Yes, somewhat common. I work in embedded, and where a supplier gives us the ability to build their code it is a lot easier for us to deal with the next time we need a new build from them.
This is why I'm building this language. It's capabilities based. Build scripts can't just do whatever the hell they want to, everything is auditable, and it layers its sandboxing.
It's for fun and anyone looking should understand that this is AI driven building with human driven design, but the goal is to demonstrate.
https://cangjie-lang.cn/en/docs?url=%2F1.0.0%2Fuser_manual%2...
2. Add syscall(s) to POSIX, which encourages *nix adoption, with an API like the following:
- Drop capabilities for thread/process except allow list.
- Test if current thread/process has all listed capabilities.
- List should be able to represent capabilities and their attributes, much like a single unveil() OpenBSD call, maybe as an array of/pointer to struct.
- (Program crashes if syscall capability is missing.)
This is partially because for nearly every project the build system is something they need and don't care about. When they need something weird they hack just enough to make it work and never ask "how should the build system change so that this was a property instead of running code", and thus build systems are slow to improve. In a number of cases the build system did have a way to do that thing, but the person didn't know about it.
There are also a lot of code generators out there. I have yet to see a large project which didn't have their own code generator for something specific to their project (protobuf is an example from Google that has escaped and become useful elsewhere, but there are many others that are specific to one project. Yacc is from the 1970s, and stands for "yet another compiler compiler" - implying the idea was already common 50 years ago). You cannot have/use these useful tools without running arbitrary code.
I'm using OpenBSD and the ports system set up two users `_pbuild` and `_pfetch` for building packages. The first one is for building and the sample `pf.conf` (firewall) forbid it from accessing the network. The second does fetch the files , but it's declarative with every files listed and signed. Even for languages like go and rust.
Fetching files while building is the bad idea there.
The idea is "least privilege", and we desperately need it in computing. The precise technical mechanism we use to achieve it is less important than committing to the idea that a dependency doesn't run with full privilege of its host program and an install script doesn't run with full privilege of the programmer.
The original Linux seccomp is old enough to drink. It's always been possible to do things like expand macros in a no-IO environment. Nobody's bothered to do it over the past two decades. Why would anyone bother in the next two decades?
Look at how snap, flatpak, etc. provoke people to just turn off security rather than deal with breakages.
A new language won't help because the problem is social, not technical.
FFS, you can't even get people to use filesystems via intermediate objects in today's languages. People think your language is broken if you don't have an ambient open(). You don't need a new language to enforce capability discipline. You need to whack people repeatedly with a cluebat until their laziness and brain damage abate.
Sandboxing almost always involves having a dedicated, privileged service, due to how operating systems have designed things. It requires platform specific code.
This is a technical problem and a social problem, there's zero reason to believe it's just one.
> Sandboxing almost always involves having a dedicated, privileged service, due to how operating systems have designed things.
Or just invoking bwrap. Or sandbox-execute. There's no performance overhead. Complexity is minimal. Just read current Codex source code. It's not so bad. People have been making these sandbox tools for AI agents for years. Just need to apply sandboxing to all domains.
You want some kind of silver bullet that makes code "safe" without anyone having to change anything? To prompt for nothing? To use no IPC portal? That's not happening.
The people saying we need a new language or something are half right. We don't need a new language. A pure library solution is fine! But people do need to do work to make an ecosystem based on capabilities and least privilege to work. And we need to tell people who refuse to do this work to go to hell.
A new language is neither necessary nor sufficient. What we need is new set of balls.
Then obviously we have to discuss the implementation!
> Or just invoking bwrap. Or sandbox-execute. There's no performance overhead. Complexity is minimal. Just read current Codex source code. It's not so bad. People have been making these sandbox tools for AI agents for years. Just need to apply sandboxing to all domains.
Tools like bwrap literally could not have existed until very recently without also requiring suid/ privileges, and even today unprivileged user namespaces are not universally enabled. This is why the implementation matters. No, unprivileged sandboxing has not been around for years, especially not x-plat. bwrap is a perfect example of what I'm talking about, great reference - it either requires root or it requires unprivileged user namespaces and it's not x-plat. Great.
> You want some kind of silver bullet that makes code "safe" without anyone having to change anything? To prompt for nothing? To use no IPC portal? That's not happening.
I have no idea why you think I've said this, I'm pointing out that the implementation and technology matters deeply.
> The people saying we need a new language or something are half right. We don't need a new language. A pure library solution is fine! But people do need to do work to make an ecosystem based on capabilities and least privilege to work. And we need to tell people who refuse to do this work to go to hell.
Again, you can't say "this technology has existed for years! You can do it in a library!" and then say "but they don't!". You misunderstand the complexity and assert that it's merely a matter of will. It is both.
And yes, bwrap needs root or namespaces. So what? So does sudo. Setuid binaries are as old as time.
You know what's also been around and doesn't require root? Landlock. Have you heard of it? Has anyone? There's a huge PR and visibility gap in this space. We don't have to invent some new thing. We have to get people to learn about what we already have and use it.
"Oh, the technology works, but it need setup! Oh, my distro doesn't enable it! Oh, it doesn't work out of the box with my code!"
This is a social problem. It's not a technology problem. It's people not wanting to do the work, not understanding what already exists, dismissing solutions based on non-problems (like bwrap needing privileges on some systems), and in general adopting an attitude of "no", not a can-do problem solving stance.
And we're supposed to solve this problem with let another precious little effects language or another fucking MicroVM environment? FFS.
We need unprivileged sandboxing!"
"Use bwrap"
"Nooo, that needs setuid root or file caps!!!1!1"
"So the problem is that bwrap is part of the TCB?"
"Yes. We need sandboxing that relies only on unprivileged code like the Linux kernel"
... the fuck?
You can't solve a social problem with technology.
Yes, it's an amazing feat that has cost billions and led to major features like seccomp v2, ptrace sandboxing, etc. Do you know the history of browser sandboxing? It's pretty complex, a major technical feat.
> Don't sit there and tell me that bwrap, sandboxing, whatever is some kind of recent innovation with uneven distro support.
I can tell you that unprivileged sandboxing is not only new, it's ongoing and nascent work and not commonplace at all.
> And yes, bwrap needs root or namespaces. So what? So does sudo. Setuid binaries are as old as time.
These are massive footguns and issues for deploying code... You don't get that? Again, implementations have tradeoffs.
> You know what's also been around and doesn't require root? Landlock.
lol it is SO NEW what the fuck dude?
> Have you heard of it? Has anyone?
Yes, I use it!
> "Oh, the technology works, but it need setup! Oh, my distro doesn't enable it! Oh, it doesn't work out of the box with my code!"
> This is a social problem.
Yeah these sound like social problems if you have literally no idea what you're talking about lmfao. IT's BOTH.
Your ignorance is blatant and your position is dead in the water.
It would allow projects to avoid newly published dependency versions until a configurable waiting period has elapsed.
npm has had a similar min-release-age feature for years.
Supply chain attacks are not a problem that can be solved by a single silver bullet, however the biggest benefit comes from a combination of minimum release age + fresh 2FA required for every publish + automated scanning. This makes it considerably more difficult to pull off a supply chain attack and should be the baseline security for all package managers.
Why do so many languages fall into this horrible practice?
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 stuff for you."
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.
It never ends .·°՞(っ-ᯅ-ς)՞°·.
Build a simple makefile, and you're off to the races.
At least, for my cases, that is.
With NPM and Rust's focus on project's level dependencies, there's no longer emphasis on API stability. Instead we have breakage every months, forcing everyone on the upgrade treadmill. It's easier to audit C library because they focus mostly on security updates instead of redesigning the API for the nth time.
Where it loses me is Cargo and everything surrounding it. I'm essentially forced into an extreme where I just never use anything in the Rust ecosystem, or I have to deal with insane dependency graphs that have the density and microstate complexity of a neutron star.
> Where it loses me is Cargo and everything surrounding it.
High praise!
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.
People weaponizing Rust rewrites with permissive licenses is another problem, but it's not about the programming language itself.
Writing macros in rust is a pretty horrible experience but it's not difficult
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 people build against and it is encouraged to use its standard library rather than rolling your own or importing another package to solve the problem.
Java's standard library had arguably also been poor for a very long time and "import tons of libraries" just had not been practical for most of that time because the tooling and ecosystem for that did not exist yet.
The solution was apache-commons and guava. Two large libraries with everything the developers heart desired and well maintained by large organizations.
For Rust be probably will never have anything exactly like that because requirements from no-std development to fully fledged backend service are too diverse, but there is still room for a small number of well maintained backed by reputable developers convenience libraries in my opinion.
And it has to be mandatory. Top-level package names will always have more cachet. Developers are suckers for good package names, literal or imaginative. Plus it helps address, but by no means completely solves, name and typo squatting.
I understand people and groups can run their own crates.io-like repository, but that's a tangential aspect. Even if this were ubiquitous, you'd still want mandatory namespacing. You want provenance, or at least intended/nominal provenance, to be as transparent as possible, not implicit or buried. By no means a complete solution, but an important foundation for better technical and culture patterns.
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..
> a lot of the Go standard library is also extremely low quality
Now adjust your definition of "a lot" to include all other languages instead of apparently arbitrarily deciding that "a lot" means at best 10 and pretending that "weird edge cases all over the place" isn't normal.
I also wonder what your issue is with most of those, especially since e.g. regexp is excellent in the context of this thread - it runs in linear time, so it's not possible to craft a malicious input that will make it slow down to a crawl.
> Over time many will probably get new incompatible versions just like json.
What a bizarre statement to make.
FYI: "The encoding/json package is now backed by the v2 implementation.". You get all the benefits possible from the v2 implementation for free while maintating backwards compat and if you want to upgrade to something better, v2 is right there.
Do you have some magical suggestion how this could have possibly been handled better? And no, not having json in the stdlib isn't a viable path, that's just a cop out. But I guess since e.g. Rust and Java don't have json in their stdlibs at all, you can't say their json packages are bad, how clever and smart!
Another frequently made suggestion straight from la-la land is just writing perfect code from the get-go. Brilliant, can't believe nobody's ever thought of that.
Meanwhile in the real world, you've been able to reap the benefits of the solid encoding/json for over a decade now, and with v2 you get some nice free backwards compatible improvements and have a clear path to upgrading to v2. Perfectly handled IMO.
The code in those packages is so far from perfect it's absurd. Like most Go developers, you just have extremely low standards.
The reason I don't think it's a sufficient explanation is that there is a clear history of large, 3rd party libraries being created exactly to supplement poor standard libraries. C++ has Boost, Java has Apache Commons (though Java also has a pretty huge standard library), arguably we could even say C has Posix/Win32/Cocoa.
I believe there is some deeper cultural reason why certain language ecosystems coalesce large utility libraries, while others prefer myriad tiny dependencies.
Lots of languages have a bad stdlib but don’t fall into the trap of having thousands of micro libraries.
The reason people do it is because it brings clout and money. Just look for articles defending micro libs: the popular ones are by people who make a living on donations, due to maintaining 1000+ packages.
And collaborating in larger libs/stdlib is hard. Plus: Rust, Node, all have a lot of visibility.
You need a good stdlib culture to avoid it (like Go did).
I remember the days where I had to manually put the Spring .jar files into my project. No way I am doing that for 100s of dependencies.
candle, the most popular rust ml library I found in a cursory search, has 119 for cpu only, and 150 to bring in CUDA.
I guess it's taste whether that's comparable
this would have been a way more satisfying dunk if nvidia hadn't split the cuda functionality needed by pytorch into 19 (!) packages on pypi but such is life.
But a Python example doesn't really count, in my mind -- Python is pre-GitHub so tends to have small numbers of large external dependencies, like C++ and other older languages.
But yeah, small number of large dependencies is the way to go.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49372853
There is an open issue for this: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/13681
I share the dislike for arbitrary build scripts but restricting them will not help the supply chain issue in a significant way.
Also there are several ways to control build.rs execution in the Cargo ecosystem as well, for example with cargo-deny.
pnpm does have some other features to prevent supply chain attacks, so there is still something to learn from other ecosystems. For example pnpm has a cooldown period for new dependencies and can prevent trust policy downgrades (eg new version published without build provenance where older versions did have it). See https://pnpm.io/supply-chain-security
Cargo has `min-publish-age` in nightly, and it's currently heading towards stabilization: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/17335
Also, crates.io can defer serving up newly uploaded scripts that have a new build.rs / proc-macro dependency and warn publicly that a version introduces it.
Restricting build scripts 100% will help mitigate the impact, just not if you only deny it once. And they can develop other things like sandboxing for build scripts by default and escaping that to be the exception that has to be explicitly allowed.
`cargo add` is sufficient to compromise you, before you have a chance to even vet the code.
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.
That doesn't mean you jump to importing nonsense or trivial dependencies. The top hundred are efficient, well-designed crates of the quality you'd expect in a large std like Go or Swift, sometimes even higher as people can write better implementations that they otherwise wouldn't (or wouldn't be used over std). And those languages make breaking changes! C++ is mostly stable, so it's full of junk like <regex> or just unordered_map. Rust managed to wholesale reimplement HashMap 6 months after SwissTable released, like it is also easier to express this level of encapsulation, but that's part of countless design/interface decisions made deliberately to not constrain forwards compatibility, including a smaller std.
However, that's no excuse to have a worse developer experience in this area. We need better tools to vet and communicate the quality of a crate and its supply-chain, like community-curated or even additional org-maintained crates, and maybe a handful delivered precompiled in the default rustup distribution which can change over time. I don't think they need to be added to std itself though
I won't mention lack of date/time lib because that's complex and changes often.
That's why projects end up with 100s of crates, sometimes 1000s.
This might not be a well received fact in Rust community, but it's a fact nonetheless.
JSON: there are a ton of different ways to do serialization and deserialization, each with their own tradeoffs, and serde (the most popular) is far from universally agreed upon. The same goes for JSON specifically, there are many different serialization formats with different tradeoffs.
regex: Owned by the rust-lang organization already. You get the benefits of trust (if you trust std, you trust the rust-lang organization anyway), but without the issues of being in std (backwards compatibility and bloat). The only problem I see with that is that BurntSushi is still the owner of the package and as such can still publish new versions on his own (AFAIK crates.io currently requires at least one user owner, but that's something that can be solved by improving crates.io permissions).
walkdir: It has been been postponed, due to the complexity of WalkDir, but may be added in the future. I agree this should be in std. https://web.archive.org/web/20260820171531/https://github.co...
RNG: rand is still evolving, with breaking changes half a year ago. Preferred generators tend to change over time, so I don't see those getting into std (remember, it has to be maintained forever!). I could see the interface (traits) getting into std, but I see no advantage to it: it's maintained by rust-random, but even if you wanted it to be maintained by the same authors as the Rust language (let's say you trust them more than rust-random), you could just move it back to rust-lang-nursery or rust-lang.
CLI arg parsing: not simple at all! The community's preferred solution has 70kLOC (with support for so many features), but there's also argh, pico-args, and others, each with their own tradeoffs.
> That's why projects end up with 100s of crates, sometimes 1000s.
Also because libraries are split up in many crates. For example, regex is split in 3 crates: regex, regex-syntax and regex-automata, and depends on other crates from the same author, such as aho-corasick.
All that said, there are many crates, such as algorithms like aho-corasick, that I think could me moved into the rust-lang org, like regex was.
See also: https://home.expurple.me/posts/a-big-standard-library-is-ove...
Use containers for development. And reduce the amount of third party deps you import into your projects. This is only going to get worse.
This is really a cultural problem not a technical one.
I know it is almost a sport to point fingers at the "evil rust evangelists" on HN at this point, but a quick look at the fnoef's comment history would show you that they are not a rust person.
Your account, on the other hand, is a sock puppet created specifically to bitch about rust. Pot, meet kettle?
Rust developers aren't the ones who have problems with it. Otherwise they likely wouldn't be using Rust in the first place. I don't see anyone saying JavaScript is worse about it either, more that they're the same.
Why are you getting so defensive about it?
Indeed, the solution is to get away from the wild soup of author-managed dependencies and go with something with an audited collection of software that is maintained by separate human beings from the known-vulnerable hackers writing the software.
And indeed Go and .NET and Java all qualify. But the gold standard here is Debian and all its downstreams.
I think we might be able to crowdsource audits. At least in the Rust ecosystem I'm confident that this is feasible with the right tooling.
That name looked familiar to me; I believe it's the same David Roundy who was an academic at Reed College who wrote DARCS, which is version control software. I used DARCS when I started grad school around 2010 before switching to git.
The fact is that your dependencies are your responsibility. You should be staying up to date on what you depend on and their vulnerabilities. Most vulnerabilities affect specific code paths which may not be present in your code base and do not require mitigation. These are decisions you can make by understanding what your dependencies are instead of offloading to automated package management systems.
NPM has been the posterchild of these types of issues but the dependency stack I saw everytime I compiled even simple programs in Rust made me think Rust would be impacted next. Personally I think third party modules that are effectively universally used (axum, tokio, serde) should be integrated directly into the language.
Just because you don't develop a package manager for your language, doesn't mean someone else won't. See NPM.
It seems like we should be building and testing everything in bubblewrap or some other sandbox going forward.
Developer machines are quite juicy targets. They tend to have all sorts of credentials lying around, so it often isn't too difficult to escalate from that to compromising AWS/GCP/etc.
On top of that there's very little preventing a compromise. Developers are inherently expected to run untrusted code, and the usual Linux / MacOS laptop probably isn't even running any kind of anti-virus protection. Want to compromise the downstream app? Now you also need to pass Play Protect & friends.
> It seems like we should be building and testing everything in bubblewrap or some other sandbox going forward.
Yes, we really should. It is frankly a miracle that it has taken so long for fetch-time / install-time code execution to start blowing up in our faces. If we are spending so much effort on run-time isolation, why are we completely ignoring all those practices during development?
You might assume we are able to detect all malicious behavior at runtime. But "stuxnet" and more recently, the xz compromise say otherwise. What if a not-so-popular crate deep in the dependency chain subtly introduced a LPE in it's code?
I won't spoil the claim in the video about what the dependency number is correlated with, and I'm not even sure how true it is in general, but it's very interesting.
Compromising the code that is then most likely run in a test instead of compromising a build script is just a very slight inconvenience for the attacker.
I'm not particularly fond of arbitrary build scripts either, but restricting them will not help the supply chain issue in a significant way.
Also there are several ways to control build.rs execution in the Cargo ecosystem, for example with cargo-deny.
I also disagree a build scripts is a mild convenience. A build script always runs for anyone it’s a dependency for with full access and context and often has access to secrets in CI. A compromised runtime has more limited access and requires actual invocation of code paths (if you’re lying as a dependency that’s never executed, no exploit).
Of course Rust should have language-level support for capabilities so that just invoking a function doesn’t grant it access to arbitrary disk access. But that’s a much more difficult change than tweaking the defaults for cargo.
Well, it depends on the language: language which "capabilities" (both for the source code and for the building* ) could in theory really reduce a lot of the burden to identify supply chain attacks.
*: some research language have/had capabilities which would make supply chain attack "obvious" but for build systems I don't know if this exist.
Same people who keep the whole rust project going, a lot of those are volunteers aren't they? Not mad to think they could do the same for core packages at least
Sure, but from my understanding the Rust project is generally "bottom-up" in that volunteers generally work on what they want to rather than submit their time into a pool for some kind of higher-level management to direct.
This crate isn't one of them.
still caught in hours though, so just as a general rule: never install anything newer than 7 days old packages
cargo feature for this is still unstable infuriatingly:
Especially because Rust devs brag so much about how it's soo superior to everything else, but then these amateur mishaps happen.
Rust isn't getting the exposure it deserves, I think, partly due to arrogance within the Rust community and a mental complex about "being better than everyone else" - that mentality never works
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.
In the end it is your decision to use unaudited or refuse unaudited crates.
It should be the default behavior of the package manager to allow downloading only audited/trusted packages. Forcing end-users of the language to be responsible for audit of all dependencies is impractical.