crev VS cargo-vet

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

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).