advisory-db VS project-safe-transmute

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.

Project "safe transmute"

In this case a simple From implementation or anything like that won't be different, even performance wise. For more complex cases there's project-safe-transmute, but that will still require you to annotate your structs in such a way that their layouts will be guaranteed to be compatible, which you're not currently doing.

You might also be interested in the project safe transmute, which might bring safe transmutes like these to stdlib in the future.

That's probably a job for the safe transmute project

One of the biggest notable examples is unsafe transmutes that could be safe. In fact there's a safe transmute working group trying to cover these cases. Just to give an example, if you have a #[repr(transparent)] newtype, it could be possible to safely transmute from a reference of an inner type to the type it wraps (for e.g. 1-tuple or 1-field structs), but doing that now presently requires unsafe.

Jokes aside, there is actually a work on going for making a subset of transmutes safe: https://github.com/rust-lang/project-safe-transmute