Rust has a HUGE supply chain security problem
kerkour.com
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July 2, 2024

Sylvain Kerkour writes:

Rust adoption is stagnating not because it’s missing some feature pushed by programming language theory enthusiasts, but because of a lack of focus on solving the practical problems that developers are facing every day.

… no company outside of AWS is making SDKs for Rust … it has no official HTTP library.

As a result of Rust’s lack of official packages, even its core infrastructure components need to import hundreds of third-party crates.

  • cargo imports over 400 crates.

  • crates.io has over 500 transitive dependencies.

…the offical libsignal (from the Signal messaging app) uses 500 third-party packages.

… what is really inside these packages. It has been found last month that among the 999 most popular packages on crates.io, the content of around 20% of these doesn’t even match the content of their Git repository.

…how I would do it (there may be better ways):

A stdx (for std eXtended) under the rust-lang organization containing the most-needed packages. … to make it secure: all packages in stdx can only import packages from std or stdx. No third-party imports. No supply-chain risks.

[stdx packages to include, among others]:

gzip, hex, http, json, net, rand

Read Rust has a HUGE supply chain security problem

Submitter’s note:

I find the author’s writing style immature, sensationalist, and tiresome, but they raise a number of what appear to be solid points, some of which are highlighted above.

    • Soso@pouet.chapril.org
      1·
      4 months ago

      @FizzyOrange My point is that regardless of whether it’s “blessed” by the Rust project, your only guarantee of maintenance is only that there are developers or other companies motivated to maintain the project. That also applies to individual parts of the standard library.

      Just like with the non-blessed versions, you need to pay attention to who actually maintains it, and guess whether this crate or feature will be maintained in the long run.