advisory-db VS cargo-vet

You might also want to add this to https://github.com/rustsec/advisory-db so that cargo audit and Dependabot surface it.

The behavior of not extracting outside the specified directory has been the default since forever in Rust's tar. And then it had two RUSTSEC advisories for not handling this correctly in certain corner cases. The latest one in 2021.

cargo-audit only checks for known issues reported to a vulnerability database.

However, I keep getting this error when running cargo audit bin ~/.cargo/bin/*, even if I replace * with a specific binary: Fetching advisory database from `https://github.com/RustSec/advisory-db.git` Loaded 467 security advisories (from C:\Users\jonah\.cargo\advisory-db) Updating crates.io index error: I/O operation failed: The system cannot find the path specified. (os error 3) I'm on Windows 10.

I usually open an issue asking if the crate is still maintained. If there isn't a response for a decent amount of time (like multiple months) and the crate is somewhat popular then it could be worth opening an unmaintained advisory in the advisory-db

Here is the visualization of RustSec Advisory Database. I hope it will be helpful. If you need any more charts, feel free to comment.

FWIW the RustSec database is still not synced into the Github databse on a regular basis, even though they did an initial import of it. So the cargo audit github action is still relevant.

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 a machine-readable file 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-...

there is also cargo-vet for manual auditing of the source code of the crates, which is not something that can be done automatically. Quite a few companies and orgs use it now like Mozilla, Google, Bytecode Alliance, us (Embark Studios), ISRG, zcash etc. And believe its usage will expand significantly going forward with corporate users and security sensitive projects/orgs.

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

The other approach is https://github.com/mozilla/cargo-vet

cargo crev and cargo vet for reviewing dependencies and using reviewed versions

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).