cli VS cargo-vet

Co-funder @ Phylum here (https://phylum.io) We have been actively scanning dependencies across npm (and PyPI, RubyGems, Crates.io, etc.) for nearly three years now; quite successfully, I might add (https://blog.phylum.io/tag/research/). We _automatically_ hit on this package when it was published, and our research team has been all over it.

A collective of us are active in Discord (https://discord.gg/Fe6pr5eW6p), continuing to hunt attacks like these. If that's something that interests you, we'd love to have you!

In addition to this, we've released several open source tools to help protect against supply chain attacks:

1. https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage - Birdcage is a cross-platform embeddable sandbox that's been baked into our CLI (which wraps npm, pypi, etc.) to sandbox package installations

2. https://github.com/phylum-dev/cli - Our CLI provides an extension capability so you can lock down random executables you might use during your software development (define _what_ it's allowed to do, e.g. network access, and then lock it down with Birdcage)

We also have a variety of integrations, including Github, Gitlab, BitBucket, CircleCI, Tines, Sophos, etc.

https://docs.phylum.io/docs/integrations_overview

It's unfortunate that software dependency attacks continue to plague open source registries. It seems unlikely this will let up in the near future. We are continuing to work closely with the open source ecosystems to try and get these sorts of packages removed when they pop up.

We're actively working on this with our sandbox (https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage). We've wrapped the likes of pip, yarn, and npm already and are making moves to similarly provide support for cargo.

Currently comes as part of the Phylum CLI (https://github.com/phylum-dev/cli), so that doing something like:

    phylum npm install 

cli - uses sandbox to block packages during installation, performs pre-install checks to determine (by hitting the API) if the package performs actions congruent with malware, e.g. phylum pip install requests will use pip wrapped by the sandbox to install requests after verifying that it doesn't have malware like behavior.

This is bundled with our CLI tool today (which is also open source) and allows you to install packages with phylum npm install . We currently support npm, yarn and pip and are planning on rolling out further support for other ecosystems in coming months.

We open sourced our tooling to help with this problem specifically. We have an extension framework that wraps npm for three purposes:

Our CLI tool (also open source and free) will check for typosquats, dependency confusion, malicious code, vulnerabilities, etc. in your package dependencies. Works for pypi, npm, rubygems, maven, nuget and very recently golang and rust crates.

This is built into the Phylum CLI so you can do things like:

This is one of the projects we're working on (and open sourcing)!

Currently allows you to specify allowed resources during the package installation in a way very similar to what you've outlined [1].

The sandbox itself lives here [2] and can be integrated into other projects.

1. https://github.com/phylum-dev/cli/blob/main/extensions/npm/P...

2. https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage

We will start here with a slightly more in-depth, custom version of the existing NPM shim extension - a tool that enforces default project policy when installing NPM packages. This custom extension will do some additional custom validation before allowing the installation process to continue.

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).