cc-rs VS cargo-auditable

It does support calling into other compilers and toolchains through build scripts and such. Take cc-rs[0] for example: this allows building C and C++ files natively without even calling an executable yourself.

In practice, I'd expect libraries to just call make/cmake/ninja for you, or (like openssl-sys) ask you to install the necessary libraries using your favourite package manager.

[0]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cc-rs

The cc crate (https://github.com/rust-lang/cc-rs) is widely used for compiling C code from Rust (often in a build.rs file for the purpose of wrapping a C library so that it can be used from Rust). However, I believe it generally does expect a C compiler to be present.

It might be quite tedious to compile static library manually every time we make changes in C code. The better solution is to instead utilize the cc crate, which provides an idiomatic Rust interface to the compiler provided by the host.

https://github.com/alexcrichton/cc-rs This crates lets you shell out to a C compiler when building your Rust project

> You're splitting hairs in a weird way. rustc cannot compile C code. zig can.

But why do I care? I don't use rustc directly, the build system of choice does. And very few of the major build systems have an issue handling multiple languages.

Cargo (rust's build system) supports build scripts and the community has already created C/C++ compiler hooks such as https://github.com/alexcrichton/cc-rs

rustup and cargo also provide easy cross-compilation support, too.

I think it's getting confused because link.exe is in your PATH. But it's not the link.exe it expects. Link tools are detected using the cc crate so it would need to be fixed there. Would you be willing to open an issue about this?

It’s not super well-documented, but there is an option to change this. --remap-path-prefix $(pwd)= in your RUSTFLAGS will usually do the trick. If you have any C dependencies you’ll also need similar things in CFLAGS, see https://github.com/alexcrichton/cc-rs/issues/593

Further we use cargo-auditable and cargo-audit as part of both our pipeline and regular scanning of all deployed services. This makes our InfoSec and Legal super happy since it means they can also monitor compliance with licenses and patch/update timings.

This exists, see cargo auditable.

The Rust community seems to have settled on a perfectly reasonable way to address bit-rot in statically linked binaries. https://github.com/rust-secure-code/cargo-auditable

Would you be open to integrating cargo auditable into this pipeline in some form? It seems like a great match.

> and static compilation probably just hides the problem unless security scanners these days can identify statically compiled vulnerable versions of libraries

Some scanners like trivy [1] can scan statically compiled binaries, provided they include dependency version information (I think go does this on its own, for rust there's [2], not sure about other languages).

It also looks into your containers.

The problem is what to do when it finds a vulnerability. In a fat app with dynamic linking you could exchange the offending library, check that this doesn't break anything for your use case, and be on your way. But with static linking you need to compile a new version, or get whoever can build it to compile a new version. Which seems to be a major drawback of discouraging fat apps.

1: https://github.com/aquasecurity/trivy

2: https://github.com/rust-secure-code/cargo-auditable

I have investigated a bunch of standardized formats - SPDX, CycloneDX, etc. All of them are unsuitable for a variety of reasons, chief of which are being way too verbose and including timestamps, which would break reproducible builds.

The fix for interoperability with cargo auditable has also shipped in the latest release of sccache. You can use the released sccache now instead of building it from git!

I've been working to bring vulnerability scanning to Rust binaries by creating cargo auditable, which embeds the list of dependencies and their versions into the compiled binary. This lets you audit the binary you actually run, instead of the Cargo.lock file in some repo somewhere.

cargo auditable solves this problem by embedding the list of dependencies and their versions into the binaries. But until it becomes part of Cargo and gets enabled by default, static linking will remain problematic.