cargo-vet

Part of the rust dependency issue is that the compiler only multithreads at the crate level currently (slowly being improved on nightly, but there's still some bugs before they can roll out the parallel compiler), so most libraries split themselves up into a ton of small crates because otherwise they just take too long to compile. edit: Also, `cargo-vet` is useful for distributed auditing of crates. There's also `cargo-crev`, but afaik it doesn't have buy in from the megacorps like cargo-vet and last I checked didn't have as many/as consistent reviews. https://github.com/mozilla/cargo-vet https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev

Well but that’s the problem. You cannot fully automate this. You have to manually check the diff of each dependency and only accept the dependabot PR if the changes are safe. The only automation that I know of is cargo vet. Although it doesn’t work for GitHub Actions, the idea sounds useful. Basically, vet allows people who trust each other to vet updates. So one person verifies the diff and then approves the changes. Next, everyone who trusts this person can update the dependency automatically since it has been “vetted”. [1]: https://github.com/mozilla/cargo-vet

For supply chain security, you might be interested in cargo-vet[0], a tool for coordinating and requiring manual reviews of open source dependencies. Both Mozilla and Google[1] have started publishing their audits.toml files, which are machine-readable files describing what source code reviews they have performed. [0] https://github.com/mozilla/cargo-vet [1] https://opensource.googleblog.com/2023/05/open-sourcing-our-...

If you don't know the author, signatures do nothing. Anybody can sign their package with some key. Even if you could check the author's identity, that still does very little for you, unless you know them personally. It makes a lot more sense to use cryptography to verify that releases are not malicious directly. Tools like crev [1], vouch [2], and cargo-vet [3] allow you to trust your colleagues or specific people to review packages before you install them. That way you don't have to trust their authors or package repositories at all. That seems like a much more viable path forward than expecting package repositories to audit packages or trying to assign trust onto random developers. [1]: https://github.com/crev-dev/crev [2]: https://github.com/vouch-dev/vouch [3]: https://github.com/mozilla/cargo-vet

I don't think it makes much sense to verify pypi authors. I mean you could verify corporations and universities and that would get you far, but most of the packages you use are maintained by random people who signed up with a random email address. I think it makes more sense to verify individual releases. There are tools in that space like crev [1], vouch [2], and cargo-vet [3] that facilitate this, allowing you to trust your colleagues or specific people rather than the package authors. This seems like a much more viable solution to scale trust. [1]: https://github.com/crev-dev/crev [2]: https://github.com/vouch-dev/vouch [3]: https://github.com/mozilla/cargo-vet

Since the audits are designed to be used at a per project level and contributed directly into the VCS repo (allowing you to using git signing for example) I don't quite understand what additional off-line cryptographic signatures are required here (considering that Cargo's lockfiles already contain a hash of the crate which would prevent the project from getting an altered version of a crate accidentally and that SHA validation is being considered as part of vet as well https://github.com/mozilla/cargo-vet/issues/116).

Two more alternatives to crev: https://github.com/vouch-dev/vouch https://github.com/mozilla/cargo-vet