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