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0 pointspheggs1mo ago0 comments

yes, the average amount of dependencies used per dependency appears to be much larger in rust and thats what I meant and is worrying me. In theory C can be written in a memory safe manner, and in theory rust can be used without large junks of supply vulnerabilities. both of these are not the case in practice though

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kibwen1mo ago

> both of these are not the case in practice though

No, people routinely write Rust with no third-party dependencies, and yet people do not routinely write C code that is memory-safe. Your threat model needs re-evaluating. Also keep in mind that the most common dependencies (rand, serde, regex, etc) are literally provided by the Rust project itself, and are no more susceptible to supply chain attacks than the compiler.

pheggsOP1mo ago

I know it's a sensitive topic for a lot of people, but as I said, I love rust. I don't know a lot of rust projects though that don't use any dependencies. In my humble opinion, disregarding the risks of such supply chain attacks is at least as bad as people disregarding the risk of memory unsafe code. But keep in mind, I'm not saying don't use rust.

mamma_mia1mo ago

mamma mia! one day anyhow and anyerror will be backdoored it's inevitable

ceteia1mo ago

People also write Rust code that is not memory-safe.

https://materialize.com/blog/rust-concurrency-bug-unbounded-...

joshuamorton1mo ago

But not "routinely".

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kibwen1mo ago

The vast majority of Rust code out there doesn't use the `unsafe` keyword at all, and the vastly smaller amount of unsafe code that exists allows for focused and precise testing and verification. You really have no idea what you're talking about if you're trying to say that Rust is anywhere in the ballpark of C or C++ here.

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dbdr1mo ago

One difference is that it's an incredibly hard problem to check whether your C code is memory safe since every single line of your code is a risk. On the other hand, it's easy to at least assess where your supply vulnerabilities lie (read Cargo.toml), and you can enforce your policy of choice (e.g. whitelist a few specific dependencies only, vendor them, etc).

pheggsOP1mo ago

I would argue that almost all major rust projects use dependencies. Checking the dependencies for vulnerabilities might be just as difficult as checking C code for memory safety, maybe even worse, because dependencies have dependencies and the amount of code to be checked can easily sky rocket. The problem gets even worse if you consider that not all rust code is safe, and that C libraries can be included and so on

dbdr1mo ago

Yes, but I believe that results in a cost/benefit analysis. If there are readily available rust crates that do something you need, and the cost of a possible vulnerability is not huge, most projects might decide (right or wrong) that it is worth it. It's an interesting question why projects tend to make different decisions in different languages, but it does not necessarily mean that you have to make the same decisions.

My point is that if you put a very high emphasis on avoiding vulnerabilities, you can either write the code in C with no/limited dependencies (and still risk memory safety bugs), or write the code in Rust with no/limited dependencies and no/limited unsafe code, and get much stronger guarantees for the same/less effort.

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