SAN FRANCISCO, CA - In the wake of a devastating supply chain attack in the npm registry that left millions of enterprise applications compromised and billions of user records exposed, developers across the JavaScript ecosystem expressed deep sorrow today, lamenting that such a crisis was completely unavoidable.
“It’s a shame, but what can you do? This is just the price of building modern web apps,” said Senior Frontend Engineer Mark Vance, echoing the sentiments of a community that completely relies on a 40-level-deep nested tree of unvetted packages maintained by pseudonymous strangers to capitalize a single string. “There’s absolutely no way to foresee or prevent someone from taking over a long-abandoned utility package and injecting a crypto-miner into every production build in the world. It’s just an act of nature.”
If you cargo install something you get source code (unless the library packages a binary, but that’s the same as if it were JS or Python or C). Rust dependencies don’t become binary until the final product.
Auditing Rust binaries isn’t much worse than auditing minified and uglified JS. I’ve done both.
I’d imagine Rust’s strict enforcement of a few specific patterns makes the assembly more predictable than C/++ where you can do literally anything?