Comment by ninkendo
3 days ago
> No the claim is that very few people read the dependencies[1] enough to catch a malicious piece of code.
You’re shifting around between reading enough to catch any issue (which I could easily do if a vulnerability was right there staring at me when I follow symbol) to catching all issues (like your comment about build.rs.) Please stick with one and avoid moving goal posts around.
There exists a category of dependency issues that I could easily spot in my everyday reading of my dependencies’ source code. It’s not all of them. Your claim is that I would spot zero of them, which is overly broad.
You’re also trying to turn this into a black-or-white issue, as if to say that if it isn’t perfect (ie. I don’t regularly look at build.rs), it isn’t worth anything, which is antithetical to good security. The more eyeballs the better, and the more opportunities to spot something awry, the better.
I'm not moving the goal post, a supply chain attack is an adversarial situation it is not about spotting an issue occurring at random, it is about spotting an issue specially crafted to avoid detection. So in practice you are either able to spot every kind of issues, or none of the relevant ones because if there's one kind that reliably slips through, then you can be certain that the attacker will focus on this kind and ignore the trivial to spot ones.
If anything, having access to the source code gives you an illusion of security, which is probably the worse place to be in.
The worse ecosystem when it comes to supply chain attacks is arguably the npm one, yet there anyone can see the source and there are almost two orders of magnitude more eyeballs.
In such an environment I’m doomed anyway, even if I’m vetting code. I don’t understand why the goal has to be “the ability to spot attacks specifically designed to prevent you from detecting.” For what you’re describing, there seems to be no hope at all.
It’s like if someone says “don’t pipe curl into bash to install software”, ok that may or may not be good advice. But then someone else says “yeah, I download the script first and give it a cursory glance to see what it’s doing”, wouldn’t you agree they’re marginally better off than the people who just do it blindly?
If not, maybe we just aren’t coming from any mutual shared experience. It seems flatly obvious to me that being able to read the code I’m running puts me in a better spot. Maybe we just fundamentally disagree.
> It’s like if someone says “don’t pipe curl into bash to install software”, ok that may or may not be good advice. But then someone else says “yeah, I download the script first and give it a cursory glance to see what it’s doing”, wouldn’t you agree they’re marginally better off than the people who just do it blindly?
I don't agree with your comparison, in this case it's more like downloading, then running it without having read it and then every once in a while look at a snippet containing a feature that interest you.
The comparison to “download the script and read it before you run it” would be to download the crate's repo, read it and then vendor the code you've read to use as a dependency, which is what I'd consider proper vetting (in this case the attacker would need to be much more sophisticated to avoid detection, it's still possible but in this case at least you've actually gained something), but it's a lot more work.