cargo-vet VS git-ts

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).

I wrote a tool a long time ago to publish a tree of git sha's to a neat non-distributed pre-blockchain that was being supported by the Linux Foundation, publictimestamp.org

https://github.com/rektide/git-ts

Alas frigging publictimestamp.krg was a pretty basic site which was fully dynically rendered. Nine of web.archive.org leaves any evidence of what the public timestamping (centralized) blockchain was anymore. Terrible bitrot, ironically for a.project that was all about preserving histor That's a real bite in the ass by irony!

a long time ago i wrote https://github.com/rektide/git-ts , which posted git commit checksums to https://publictimestamp.org, which was a public service one could submit hashes to which would attest to them. hosted by linux foundation for a while. i really wish the website were still up to explain the project, even if it's offline. i loved having a way to say- yes, this commit is indeed from when it says it was.

there'a a ton of attestation stuff going on in cloud land these days, often under lofty objectives like "supply chain security".