SES-shim VS cargo-crev

I used E in the 90s: http://erights.org/

I haven't kept up with newer systems but I've heard of https://github.com/endojs/endo and just came across http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/home/anon/isr2017... (which says "in the style of the E programming language" -- that's as far as I've read) while looking that up.

WebAssembly was designed to follow the same capability security principles. CHERI too as someone else just brought up.

There are other potential solutions I haven’t explored close enough (like Endo and SES), or completely omitted as they’re based on an imperfect blacklist-based approach to security (like sandboxed WebWorkers). However, the mentioned 4 solutions are the top contenders, at least in my mind.

I don't know why you are being silently downvoted, as I think it is worth talking about the potential of using static analysis to improve things.

One promising approach is Endo[0] which "uses LavaMoat to automatically generate reviewable policies that determine what capabilities will be distributed to third party dependencies."

[0] https://github.com/endojs/endo

Agoric moved forward and Realms gave way to SES

https://github.com/endojs/endo/tree/master/packages/ses

And Endo is a set of tools (being) built around it to make it more practical for particular usecases

Yea you could restrict the app by whitelisting only the network services and folders that it will use and that's pretty valuable though at least on Linux could already easily be achieved otherwise. It's good that Deno makes it easy but let's be honest, most people will just pass -A.

I'd love to see a permissions system on a library basis. It would ask the first time a dependency is added and when a new permission is requested after an update. Javascript doesn't make that easy though by being so dynamic. SES could maybe help: https://github.com/endojs/endo/blob/master/packages/ses/READ...

I was poking around on the internet a bit earlier and I found this project. It looks pretty cool, and I figured perhaps a few of y'all might find it cool too!

I have no idea if it actually sandboxes networking by default. This other project, endo[0], seems to add some of that functionality.

Regardless of the maturity though, it makes me excited to see this type of work getting done now!

(What made me want to research it was this[1] thread from the other day.)

0: https://github.com/endojs/endo

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30215212

Fortunately the problem could become more tractable if something like SES / Endo takes off:

"Endo protects program integrity both in-process and in distributed systems. SES protects local integrity, defending an application against supply chain attacks: hacks that enter through upgrades to third-party dependencies. Endo does this by encouraging the Principle of Least Authority. ... Endo uses LavaMoat to automatically generate reviewable policies that determine what capabilities will be distributed to third party dependencies."

https://github.com/endojs/endo

Yeah. JavaScript is probably the closest to being there (with things like SES[0], LavaMoat[1], etc.) but we're not quite there yet. It's just shocking that this sort of thing is as seemingly obscure as it is; it's like the whole industry has collectively thrown up their hands and said code execution is unavoidably radioactively dangerous. (While simultaneously using package managers that... well.) But it doesn't have to be!

[0] https://github.com/Agoric/ses-shim

[1] https://github.com/LavaMoat/LavaMoat

In other cases it may be more documented, such as Golangs baked-in telemetry.

There should be better ways to check these problems. The best I have found so far is Crev https://github.com/crev-dev/crev/. It's most used implementation is Cargo-crev https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev, but hopefully it will become more required to use these types of tools. Certainty and metrics about how many eyes have been on a particular script, and what expertise they have would be a huge win for software.

The main problem the author is talking about is actually about version updates, which in Maven as well as crates.io is up to each lib's author, and is not curated in any way.

There's no technical solution to that, really. Do you think Nexus Firewall can pick up every exploit, or even most? How confident of that are you, and what data do you have to back that up? I don't have any myself, but would not be surprised at all if "hackers" can easily work around their scanning.

However, I don't have a better approach than using scanning tools like Nexus, or as the author proposes, use a curated library repository like Debian is doing (which hopefully gets enough eyeballs to remain secure) or the https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev project (manually reviewed code) also mentioned. It's interesting that they mention C/C++ just rely on distros providing dynamic libs instead which means you don't even control your dependencies versions, some distro does (how reliable is the distro?)... I wonder if that could work for other languages or if it's just as painful as it looks in the C world.

For instance, the worst company imaginable may be in charge of software that was once FOSS, and they may change absolutely nothing about it, so it should be fine. However, if a small update is added that does something bad, you should know about it immediately.

The solution seems to be much more clearly in the realm of things like crev: https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev/

Wherein users can get a clear picture of what dependencies are used in the full chain, and how they have been independently reviewed for security and privacy. That's the real solution for the future. A quick score that is available upon display everytime you upgrade, with large warnings for anything above a certain threshold.

The metrics on crates.io are a useful sniff test, but ultimately you need to review things yourself, or trust some contributors and reviewers. Some projects, like cargo crev or cargo vet can help with the process.

You can use cargo-geiger or cargo-crev to check for whether people you trusted (e.g. u/jonhoo ) trust this crate.

There is a similar idea being explored with https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev - you trust a reviewer who reviews crates for trustworthiness, as well as other reviewers.

[cargo-crev](https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev) looks like a good step in the right direction but not really commonly used.

'cargo crev' makes this kind of workflow possible: https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev

The crev folks themselves are no fans of PGP but need a way to security identify that you are in fact the review author, so that's where the id generation comes in. Ultimately crev is just a bunch of repos with text files you sign with IDs. The nice property is that you can chain these together into a web of trust and it's unfortunate that vet doesn't just use the same signed files on repos model as a foundation because even if they don't trust anyone else, we could turn around and trust them.