crev VS cargo-crev

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

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.

The main problem the author is talking about is actually about version updates, which in Maven as well as crates.io is up to each lib's author, and is not curated in any way.

There's no technical solution to that, really. Do you think Nexus Firewall can pick up every exploit, or even most? How confident of that are you, and what data do you have to back that up? I don't have any myself, but would not be surprised at all if "hackers" can easily work around their scanning.

However, I don't have a better approach than using scanning tools like Nexus, or as the author proposes, use a curated library repository like Debian is doing (which hopefully gets enough eyeballs to remain secure) or the https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev project (manually reviewed code) also mentioned. It's interesting that they mention C/C++ just rely on distros providing dynamic libs instead which means you don't even control your dependencies versions, some distro does (how reliable is the distro?)... I wonder if that could work for other languages or if it's just as painful as it looks in the C world.

For instance, the worst company imaginable may be in charge of software that was once FOSS, and they may change absolutely nothing about it, so it should be fine. However, if a small update is added that does something bad, you should know about it immediately.

The solution seems to be much more clearly in the realm of things like crev: https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev/

Wherein users can get a clear picture of what dependencies are used in the full chain, and how they have been independently reviewed for security and privacy. That's the real solution for the future. A quick score that is available upon display everytime you upgrade, with large warnings for anything above a certain threshold.

The metrics on crates.io are a useful sniff test, but ultimately you need to review things yourself, or trust some contributors and reviewers. Some projects, like cargo crev or cargo vet can help with the process.

You can use cargo-geiger or cargo-crev to check for whether people you trusted (e.g. u/jonhoo ) trust this crate.

There is a similar idea being explored with https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev - you trust a reviewer who reviews crates for trustworthiness, as well as other reviewers.

[cargo-crev](https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev) looks like a good step in the right direction but not really commonly used.

'cargo crev' makes this kind of workflow possible: https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev

The crev folks themselves are no fans of PGP but need a way to security identify that you are in fact the review author, so that's where the id generation comes in. Ultimately crev is just a bunch of repos with text files you sign with IDs. The nice property is that you can chain these together into a web of trust and it's unfortunate that vet doesn't just use the same signed files on repos model as a foundation because even if they don't trust anyone else, we could turn around and trust them.