Comment by vintagedave

I wouldn't call the Rust stdlib "small". "Limited" I could agree with.

On the topics it does cover, Rust's stdlib offers a lot. At least on the same level as Python, at times surpassing it. But because the stdlib isn't versioned it stays away from everything that isn't considered "settled", especially in matters where the best interface isn't clear yet. So no http library, no date handling, no helpers for writing macros, etc.

You can absolutely write pretty substantial zero-dependency rust if you stay away from the network and async

Whether that's a good tradeoff is an open question. None of the options look really great

It's already happening: https://cyberpress.org/malicious-rust-packages/

My personal experience (YMMV): Rust code takes 2x or 3x longer to write than what came before it (C in my case), but in the end you usually get something much more likely to work, so overall it's kind of a wash, and the product you get is better for customers - you basically front load the cost of development.

This is terrible for people working in commercial projects that are obsessed with time to market.

Rust developers on commercial projects are under incredible schedule pressure from day 0, where they are compared to expectations from their previous projects, and are strongly motivated to pull in anything and everything they can to save time, because re-rolling anything themselves is so damn expensive.

> Rust and JS are both famous for having minimal standard libraries

I'm all in favor of embiggening the Rust stdlib, but Rust and JS aren't remotely in the same ballpark when it comes to stdlib size. Rust's stdlib is decidedly not minimal; it's narrow, but very deep for what it provides.

C standard library is also very small. The issue is not the standard library. The issue is adding libraries for snippets of code, and in the name of convenience, let those libraries run code on the dev machine.

This is a reason why so many enterprises use C#. Most of the time you just use Microsoft made libraries and rarely brings in 3rd party.

And yet of course the world and their spouse import requests to fetch a URL and view the body of the response.

It would be lovely if Python shipped with even more things built in. I’d like cryptography, tabulate/rich, and some more featureful datetime bells and whistles a la arrow. And of course the reason why requests is so popular is that it does actually have a few more things and ergonomic improvements over the builtin HTTP machinery.

Something like a Debian Project model would have been cool: third party projects get adopted into the main software product by a sworn-in project member who who acts as quality control / a release manager. Each piece of software stays up to date but also doesn’t just get its main branch upstreamed directly onto everyone’s laps without a second pair of eyes going over what changed. The downside is it slows everything down, but that’s a side-effect of, or rather a synonym for stability, which is the problem we have with npm. (This looks sort of like what HelixGuard do, in the original article, though I’ve not heard of them before today.)

It might solve the problem, in as much as the problem is that not only can it be done, but it’s profitable to do so. This is why there’s no Rust problem (yet).

It won't, it's a culture issue

Most rust programmers are mediocre at best and really need the memory safety training wheels that rust provides. Years of nodejs mindrot has somehow made pulling into random dependencies irregular release schedules to become the norm for these people. They'll just shrug it off come up with some "security initiative* and continue the madness

> But the fact that at least on npm it was possible that someone else grabs a package ID after an author pulled its packages is kind of alarming.

Since your comment starts with commentary on crates.io, I'll note that this has never been possible crates.io.

> Dependency confusion attacks are still possible on cargo because the whole - vs _ as delimiter wasn’t settled in the beginning.

I don't think this has ever been true. AFAIK crates.io has always prevented registering two different crates whose names differ only in the use of dashes vs underscores.

> package namespaces

See https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/122349

> proof of ownership

See https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3724 and https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/07/11/crates-io-development-...

A big thing is that Go does not install the latest version of transitive dependencies. Instead it uses Minimal version selection (MVS), see https://go.dev/ref/mod#minimal-version-selection. I highly recommend reading the article by Russ Cox mentioned in the ref. This greatly decreases your chances of being hit by malware released after a package is taken over.

In Go, access to the os and exec require certain imports, imports that must occur at the beginning of the file, this helps when scanning for malicious code. Compare this JavaScript where one could require("child_process") or import() at any time.

Personally, I started to vendor my dependencies using go mod vendor and diff after dependency updates. In the end, you are responsible for the effect of your dependencies.

In Go you know exactly what code you’re building thanks to gosum, and it’s much easier to audit changed code after upgrading - just create vendor dirs before and after updating packages and diff them; send to AI for basic screening if the diff is >100k loc and/or review manually. My projects are massive codebases with 1000s of deps and >200MB stripped binaries of literally just code, and this is perfectly feasible. (And yes I do catch stuff occasionally, tho nothing actively adversarial so far)

I don’t believe I can do the same with Rust.

The Go standard library is a lot more comprehensive and usable than Node, so you need less dependencies to begin with.

Aside from other security features already mentioned Go also doesn't execute code at compile time by design.

There is no airtight technical solution, for any language, for preventing malicious dependencies making it into your application. You can have manual or automated review using heuristics but things will still slip through. Malicious code doesn't necessarily look obvious, like decoding some base64 and piping it into bash, it can be an extremely subtle vulnerability sprinkled in that nobody will find until it's too late.

RE dependency cooldowns I'm hoping Go will get support for this. There's a project called Athens for running your own Go module proxy - maybe it could be implemented there.

> However, I can't see what those features do to defend against an attack vector that we have certainly seen elsewhere: project gets compromised, releases a malicious version, and then everyone picks it up when they next run `go get -u ./...` without doing any further checking. Which I would say is the workflow for a good chunk of actual users.

You can't, really, aside from full on code audits. By definition, if you trust a maintainer and they get compromised, you get compromised too.

Requiring GPG signing of releases (even by just git commit signing) would help but that's more work for people to distribute their stuff, and inevitably someone will make insecure but convenient way to automate that away from the developer

> Nor does cargo or pip seem to be infected with these problems to the extent that npm is.

Easy reason. The target for malware injections is almost always cryptocurrency wallets and cloud credentials (again, mostly to mine cryptocurrencies). And the utter utter majority of stuff interacting with crypto and cloud, combined with a lot of inexperienced juniors who likely won't have the skill to spot they got compromised, is written in NodeJS.

Compared to the JS ecosystem and number of users both Python and Rust are puny, also the the NPM ecosystem also allowed by default for a lot of post-install actions since they wanted to enable a smooth experience with compiling and installing native modules (Not entirely sure how Cargo and PIP handles native library dependencies).

As for Windows vs the other OS's, yes even the Windows NT family grew out of DOS and Win9x and tried to maintain compatiblity for users over security up until it became untenable. So yes, the base _was_ bad when Windows was dominant but it's far less bad today (why people target high value targets via NPM,etc since it's an easier entry-point).

Android/iOS is young enough that they did have plenty of hindsight when it comes to security and could make better decisions (Remember that MS tried to move to UWP/Appx distribution but the ecosystem was too reliant on newer features for it to displace the regular ecosystem).

Remember that we've had plenty of annoyed discourse about "Apple locking down computers" here and on other tech forums when they've pushed notarization.

I guess my point is that, people love to bash on MS but at the same time complain about how security is affecting their "freedoms" when it comes to other systems (and partly MS), MS is better at the basics today than they were 20-25 years ago and we should be happy about that.

pnpm (maybe yarn too?) requires explicit allowlisting of build scripts, hopefully npm will do the same eventually

> security model

yep, some kind of seccomp or other kind of permission system for modules would help a lot. (eg. if the 3rd party library is parsing something and its API only requires a Buffer as input and returns some object then it could be marked "pure", if it supports logging then that could be also specified, and so on)

On Debian you can use the local registry for Rust which is backed by packages.

Though I will say, even as someone who works at a company that sells Linux distributions (SUSE), while the fact we have an additional review step is nice, I think the actual auditing you get in practice is quite minimal.

For instance, quite recently[1] the Debian package for a StarDict plugin was configured automatically upload all text selected in X11 to some Chinese servers if you installed it. This is the kind of thing you'd hope distro maintainers to catch.

Though, having build scripts be executed in distribution infrastructure and shipped to everyone mitigates the risk of targeted and "dumb" attacks. C build scripts can attack your system just as easily as Rust or JavaScript ones can (in fact it's probably even easier -- look at how the xz backdoor took advantage of the inscrutability of autoconf).

[1]: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2025/08/04/1

You don't know that about a C project. And you still don't know what lurks in its 1000th reimplementation of http header parsing.

Pnpm (a very popular npm replacement) makes completely locked packages easy and natural and ultra fast:

https://pnpm.io/cli/install

Benchmarks:

https://pnpm.io/benchmarks

2020 State of the Octoverse security report showed that .NET ecosystem has on average the lowest number of transitive dependencies. Big part of that is the breadth and depth of the BCL, standard libraries, and first party libraries.

Sounds to me like another example of embrace - extend - extinguish

> Rust (and really, any but JS) ecosystem have a bit more "due dilligence" applied everywhere; I don't doubt someone will try to namesquat but chance of success are far smaller

I really agree, and I feel like it's a culture difference. Javascript was (and remains) an appealing programming language for tinkerers and hobbyists, people who don't really have a lot of engineering experience. Node and npm rose to prominence as a wild west with lots of new developers unfamiliar with good practices, stuck with a programming environment that had few "batteries included," and at a time when supply chain attacks weren't yet on everybody's minds. The barriers to entry were low and, well, the ecosystem sort of reflected that. You can't wash that legacy away overnight.

Rust in contrast attracts a different audience because of the language's own design objectives.

Obviously none of this makes it immune, and you can YOLO install random dependencies in any programming language, but I don't think any language is ever going to suffer from this in quite the same way and to the same extent that JS has simply due to when and how the ecosystem evolved.

And really, even JS today is not JS of yesteryear. Sure there are lots of bad actors and these bad NPM packages sneak in, but also... how widely are all of them used? The maturation of and standardization on certain "batteries included" frameworks rather than ad hoc piecing stuff together has reduced the liklihood of going astray.

Maven does not support "scripts" as NPM does, such as the pre-install script used for this exploit. With scripts enabled, the mere act of downloading a dependency requires a high degree of trust in it.

On your last note, I wish they would get on that signed crate subset. Having the same dependency tree as cargo, clippy, and rustc isn't increasing my risk.

Rust has already had a supply chain attack propagating via build.rs some years ago. It was noticed quickly, so staying pinned to the oldest thing that worked and had no cve pop in cargo audit is a decent strategy. The remaining risk is that some more niche dependency you use is and always has been compromised.

Is serde maintained by the Rust team? I thought it was basically a one-man show owned by dtolnay

I get the joke, but that makes me think.

What is worse between writing potentially vulnerable code yourself and having too many dependencies.

Finding vulnerabilities and writing exploits is costly, and hackers will most likely target popular libraries over your particular software, much higher impact, and it pays better. Dependencies also tend to do more than you need, increasing the attack surface.

So your C code may be worse in theory, but it is a smaller, thus harder to hit target. It is probably an advantage against undiscriminating attacks like bots and a downside against targeted attacks by motivated groups.

Don't use a framework? Loading a JS script on a page that says "when a update b" hasn't changed much in about 20 years.

Maybe I'm being a bit trite but the world of JavaScript is not some mysterious place separate from all other web programming, you can make bad decisions on either side of the stack. These comments always read like devs suddenly realizing the world of user interactions is more complicated and has more edge cases than they think.

There's no solution. The JS world is just nonstop build and dependency hell.

Being incredibly strict with TS compiler and linter helps a bit.

It's not the packaging tech. Apt will typically mean a Debian-based distro. That means the packages are chosen by the maintainers and updated only during specific time periods and tested before release. Even if the underlying software gets owned and replaced, the distro package is very unlikely to be affected. (Unless someone spent months building trust, like xz)

But the basic takeover... no, it usually won't affect any Debian style distro package, due to the release process.

That is true, but the hand-rolled StringUtil won't steal your credentials and infect your machine, which is the problem here.

And what is wrong with writing your own util library that fits your use case anyway? In C/C++ world, if it takes less than a couple hours to write, you might as well do it yourself rather than introduce a new dependency. No one sane will add a third-party git submodule, wire it to the main Makefile, just to left-pad a string.

Not really. cmake and automake are for compiling the library, not for the downloading it. The gap between the two is what's get erased from npm. And it made worse because of the auto update set by default when `npm install` is run.

> countless articles explaining what should be done instead (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41727085#41727410

> Centralized package managers only add a layer of obfuscation that attackers can use to their advantage.

They add a layer of convenience. C/C++ are missing that convenience because they aren't as composable and have a long tail of pre-package manager projects.

Java didn't start with packages, but today we have packages. Same with JS, etc.

It already did happen. It propogated via build.rs as well. But as I said elsewhere, ut doesn't help you to forgo dependencies part of rust tooling itself.

less?

NPM default installation method does not really lock down you dependencies. It allows for update when the patch number (semver) is increased. Which is why those malware bump it up. Anyone who then run `npm install` will get it and will run the code.

> In the early days the Node ecosystem adopted (from Unix) the notion that everything has to be its own micro package.

The medium is the message. If a language creates a very convenient package manager that completely eliminates the friction of sharing code, practically any permutation of code will be shared as a library. As productivity is the most important metric for most companies, devs will prefer the conveniently-shared third-party library instead of implementing something from scratch. And this is the result.

I don't believe you can have packaging convenience and avoiding dependency hell. You need some amount of friction.

PyPI is also subject to supply chain attacks. What do you mean?

How is this going to solve the supply chain attack problem at all though? It just obfuscates things even more, because once an LLM gets "infected" with malicious code, it'll become much more difficult to trace where it came from.

If anything, blind reliance on LLMs will make this problem much worse.

When there's a depedency, it's typically not for a small function. If you want to replace a full dependency package by your own generated code, you'll need to review hundreds of even thousands of line of code.

Now will you trust that AI didn't include its own set of security issues and will you have the ability to review so much code?

I wonder what the actual result will be. LLMs can generate functions quickly, but they're also keen to include packages without asking. I've had to add a "don't add new dependencies unless explicitly asked" to a few project configs.

For sure. I don't think the software ecosystem has come to terms with how things are going to change.

Libraries will be providing raw tools like - Sockets, Regex Engine, Cryptography, Syscalls, specific file format libraries

LLMs will be building the next layer.

I have build successful running projects now in Erlang, Scheme, Rust - I know the basic syntax of two of those but I couldn't write my deployed software in any of them in the couple of hours of prompting.

The scheme it had to do a lot of code from first principles and warned me how laborious it would be - "I don't care, you are doing it."

I have tools now I could not have imagined I could build in a reasonable time.

An approach I learnt from a talk posted to HN (I forget the talk, not the lesson) is to not depend on the outside project for its code, just lift that code directly in to your project, but to rely on it for the tests, requiring/importing it etc when running your own tests. That protects you from a lot of things (this kind of attack was not mentioned, afaic recall) but doesn’t allow bugs found by the other project to be missed either.

Then your dependency will be "AI getting it right every single time".

I don’t think I’ll live long enough to trust AI coding assistants with something like schema validation, just to name one thing I use dependencies for.

Nope. Know the difference.

Been a while since I looked into this, but afaik Maven Central is run by Sonatype, which happens to be one of the major players for systems related to Supply Chain Security.

From what I remember (a few years old, things may have changed) they required devs to stage packages to a specific test env, packages were inspected not only for malware but also vulnerabilities before being released to the public.

NPM on the other hand... Write a package -> publish. Npm might scan for malware, they might do a few additional checks, but at least back when I looked into it nothing happened proactively.

There were. They're just not as popular here. For example https://www.sonatype.com/blog/malware-removed-from-maven-cen...

Maven is also a bit more complex than npm and had an issue in the system itself https://arxiv.org/html/2407.18760v4

As of 2024, Maven had 1.5 trillion requests annually vs npm's 4.5 trillion - regardless of package count, 3x more downloads in total does make it a very big target (numbers from https://www.sonatype.com/state-of-the-software-supply-chain/...).

No. Having many packages might not be the only reason to start an attack. This post shows it is/was possible in the Maven ecosystem: https://blog.oversecured.com/Introducing-MavenGate-a-supply-...

One speculation would be is that most Java apps in the wild use way older Java versions (say 17/11, while the latest will LTS is 21).

Okay then, explain to me why this is only possible with NPM? Does it have a hidden "pwn" button that I don't know about?

Make no mistake, Maven Central does get multiple malware components uploaded each year, though not nearly to the same extent as npm or pypi. Sonatype (my former employer) just doesn't report on these publicly each time it happens. It's not an isolated problem but certainly harder to do with maven.

Hoe many daily downloads does Maven have?

Just use dependency cooldown. It will mitigate a lot of risk.

NPM is the largest possible target for such an attack.

Attack an important package, and you can get into the Node and Electron ecosystem. That's a huge prize.

Having a cooldown is different from never updating. I don’t think waiting a few days is a bad security practice in any environment, node or otherwise.

People who live on the edge of updates always risk vulnerabilities and incompatibility issues. It’s not about node, but anything software related.

I might say that every interpreter has a different minimum dependency level just to create a simple application. If we're talking about Node.js, there's a long list of dependencies by default.

So yes, in comparison, modern vanilla PHP with some level of developer discipline (as you mentioned) is actually quite suitable, but unfortunately not popular, for low-dependency development of web applications.

Oh yes, let's remember PHP 4.3 and all the nostalgic baggage from that era.

Modern PHP is leagues above Javascript

At the beginning, but not anymore. You still have the option to pull libraries and packages but is not really required by default.

Writing code yourself so as not to cultivate 1000 dependencies you can't possibly ensure the security of is not the same as writing assembly. That you even reach for that comparison is indicative of the deep rot in Javascript culture. Writing your own code is perceived as a completely unreasonable thing to be doing to 99% of JS-devs and that's why the web performs like trash and has breaches every other day, but it's actually a very reasonable thing to be doing and people who write most any other language typically engage in the writing of own code on a daily basis. At any rate, JS the language itself is fine, Node is fine, and it is possible to adopt better practices without forsaking the language/ecosystem completely.

I tell people this over and over and over: every time you use a third party dependency, especially an ongoing one, you should consider that you are adding the developers to your team and importing their prior decisions and their biases. You add them to your circle of trust.

You can't just scale out a team without assessing who you are adding to it: what is their reputation? where did they learn?

It's not quite the same questions when picking a library but it is the same process. Who wrote it? What else did they write? Does the code look like we could manage it if the developer quits, etc.

Nobody's saying you shouldn't use third party dependency. But nobody benefits if we pretend that adding a dependency isn't a lot like adding a person.

So yeah, if you need all of posthog without adding posthog's team to yours, you're going to have to write it yourself.

Yes. If your shop is serious about security, it is in no way unreasonable to be building out tools like that in-house, or else paying a real vendor with real security practices for their product. If you're an independent developer, the entirety of Posthog is overkill, and you can instead write the specific features you need yourself.

If they have a HTTP API using standard authentication methods it's not that difficult to create a simple wrapper. Granted a bit more work if you want to do things like input/output validation too, but there's a trade-off between ownership there and avoiding these kinds of supply-chain attacks.

Even worse! We lost <FRAME> along the way.

Yes, it's gonna be heuristics all way down. This problem isn't solved formally but the ecosystem(s) having these issues are too big to be discarded "just" because of that.

If everybody in your country drives on the right side of the road you could theoretically drive on the left. But you won't get very far like that.

People use Node because of the availability of the packages, not the other way around.

How is this situation any different from any other ecosystem? I think you don't have an argument here other than that npm is a relatively large public repository. Bad actors and ignorant developers are everywhere else too.

There are plenty of npm features to help assess packages and prevent unintended updates, but nothing replaces due diligence.

All of them. The issue at hand is not limited to a specific language or tool or ecosystem, rather it is fundamental to using a package manager to install and update 3rd party libraries.

Popular junk is still junk