crev VS LavaMoat

In other cases it may be more documented, such as Golangs baked-in telemetry.

There should be better ways to check these problems. The best I have found so far is Crev https://github.com/crev-dev/crev/. It's most used implementation is Cargo-crev https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev, but hopefully it will become more required to use these types of tools. Certainty and metrics about how many eyes have been on a particular script, and what expertise they have would be a huge win for software.

Looks like there's an implementation of it for npm: https://github.com/crev-dev/crev

I've been willing to try it for a while for Rust projects but never committed to spend the time. Any feedback?

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

I don't think it makes much sense to verify pypi authors. I mean you could verify corporations and universities and that would get you far, but most of the packages you use are maintained by random people who signed up with a random email address.

I think it makes more sense to verify individual releases. There are tools in that space like crev [1], vouch [2], and cargo-vet [3] that facilitate this, allowing you to trust your colleagues or specific people rather than the package authors. This seems like a much more viable solution to scale trust.

[1]: https://github.com/crev-dev/crev

Crev?

Alternatives to cargo-vet that has been mentioned before here on HN:

- https://github.com/crev-dev/crev

- https://github.com/vouch-dev/vouch

Anyone know of any more alternatives or similar tools already available?

I plug this every time, but here goes: https://github.com/crev-dev/crev solves this by providing code reviews, scales via a web-of-trust model, and relies on cryptographic identities. That way, you can depend on a package without having to trust its maintainers and all future versions.

I understand your worries about the number of dependencies you're "forced" to use, however, most of them tend to be doing something that's both non-trivial and useful for more than a single project. As for being able to trust all your transitive dependencies, well, that's something that the Crev project is trying to address, although I don't believe that has gained much traction yet.

It's good that having a reproducible build process is a requirement for the Gold rating, as is signed releases.

Perhaps there needs to be a Platinum level which involves storing the hash of each release in a distributed append-only log, with multiple third parties vouching that they can build the binary from the published source.

Obviously I'm thinking of something like sigstore[0] which the Arch Linux package ecosystem is being experimentally integrated with.[1] Then there's Crev for distributed code review.[2]

[0] https://docs.sigstore.dev/

[1] https://github.com/kpcyrd/pacman-bintrans

[2] https://github.com/crev-dev/crev

Just yesterday I watched a talk [0] at WarsawJS about LavaMoat [1], a set of tools to protect against malicious behaviour from npm dependencies. Guess it’s time to look into it deeper.

[0]: https://naugtur.pl/pres3/lava/2023end.html

[1]: https://github.com/LavaMoat/LavaMoat

You are basically talking about Lavamoat. It provides tooling and policies for SES, which aims to make it into standards.

https://github.com/LavaMoat/LavaMoat

Enter: lavamoat. https://github.com/LavaMoat/LavaMoat

You should check out Lavamoat: https://github.com/LavaMoat/LavaMoat

It attempts to do what you're essentially describing. It was built by the MetaMask team, where supply chain attacks are an obviously huge risk.

I've spent some time trying to get it working in an app, but haven't been able to get it all the way working. It's still pretty beta and not well documented.

And it is happening right now. Github is opening the GitHub Advisory Database to community submissions. Awesome community NodeSecure builds cool things like scanner and js-x-ray. There are also lockfile-lint, LavaMoat, Jfrog-npm-tools (and I am sure there is more).

There is a proposal to add OCAPs on a language level in TC39[0]. There is already a drop-in implementation which already works in both Nodejs and browsers[1].

As a developer who wants to sandbox your own (recursive) dependencies, this is made accessible today in Lavamoat[2]. Basically a package or app can provide a policy manifest specifying which capabilities (e.g. network or filesystem access) should be granted for each dependency. Also comes with a tool that will auto-generate a starting point from your existing dependency tree.

IMO this is the future. Currently it does come with a performance penalty but hopefully this idea will catch on and make it into runtime implementations.

Lavamoat is still marked as "preprod" on npm but talking to the author it's a matter of days or weeks until the first stable release.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30703817

[1]: https://github.com/endojs/endo/tree/master/packages/ses

[2]: https://github.com/LavaMoat/LavaMoat