advisory-db VS totally-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.

For example, there is this (pure safe Rust) code: https://github.com/ben0x539/totally-safe-transmute/blob/main... which accesses external resources (/proc/self/mem) in order to violate the safety guarantees.

The first is the totally_safe_transmute crate. I mean, who wouldn't love library code that has .expect("welp") and .expect("oof") as its error handling? But that's not even the really scary part. Issue #2 ("i hate this") remains open to this day, but for obvious reasons there's no chance of resolution. This post has some context and a line-by-line explanation of how it works.

You mean like this?

You can also do that in rust on linux: https://github.com/ben0x539/totally-safe-transmute/blob/master/src/lib.rs

I want to correct this statement: Rust can be safer, but not if a library you use contains unsound code. Unsoundness is most often caused by unsafe code, but not always (totally_safe_transmute, anyone?). There is a misconception that unsafe code blocks are always unsound and should be avoided at all costs, but they're completely fine if the safety contracts are upheld. In fact, unsafe blocks isolate the potential issues to make it easier to identify where undefined behavior may be occurring. unsafe code blocks are a feature of the language, and their usage should not be viewed as opting out of any safety the language provides, imo.

Just reimplement totally_safe_transmute in Zig. No need for unsafe.

Why transmute() when you can totally_safe_transmute()?

Well, there is always the totally-safe-transmute.

They should use https://github.com/ben0x539/totally-safe-transmute