I think I remember discussing this briefly in #rust with you. It's clearly not the case that "everyone understands" how these package managers actually work, but I'd rather see the reality become more obvious than give up and shackle these package ecosystems to Microsoft even harder than they already are.
jiggawatts|4 years ago
There's a solution to this problem, of course. The Wikipedia team provides the tools you need! You can link to a specific revision of an article so there are no surprises. What you saw when you reviewed the content is what you get when you project it in the board room, or send out that mass email that includes your boss.
Similarly the solution for crates.io could be as simple as having hyperlinks go only to specific commit hashes. And then require that the crate content match the hash.
These days I hear a lot of developers complain that they "Just want to...". I always complete the sentence with "... ignore my responsibilities."
Package managers are in the same camp. "I just want to distribute packages.". Okay, sure, but your responsibility is to do it so that downstream consumers fall into the pit of success and aren't burned by supply-chain attacks.
You can argue, or you can start working on catching up to the encyclopedia people that came from a background in porn hosting and start taking security seriously.
SpaceManiac|4 years ago
If you want to audit a crate, you don't need to require that it "matches" anything else, you can just audit the crate. Download the source tarball from the same URL that Cargo would and audit it. I think the problem with crates.io is that it just gives you the GitHub link (possibly misleading - bad!) and doesn't just give you a button to download or browse the tarball that Cargo actually uses (what you see is what you get).
Defining "matches" and enforcing it against a remote Git repository is non-trivial. It gets worse with NPM because those packages are sometimes the output of the Typescript compiler or Webpack, so now you need reproducible builds (a huge task) and a CI infrastructure to validate them. Nuget distributes .dll files, which often aren't even open source. There's no hope to enforce a correspondence with a Git repository there. A developer who wants to audit a Nuget package has no choice but to decompile it.
NPM clearly has a malware problem, and Cargo will eventually have one because it really wants to be like NPM. I'm not convinced that what you propose is the solution.