For anyone confused, this is (very good imo) fiction about supply-chain incidents. It had me very worried during a brief scan that it was real though, which made me read it more attentively :)
> Day 1, 14:47 UTC — Among the exfiltrated credentials: the maintainer of vulpine-lz4, a Rust library for “blazingly fast Firefox-themed LZ4 decompression.” The library’s logo is a cartoon fox with sunglasses. It has 12 stars on GitHub but is a transitive dependency of cargo itself.
I got a bit curious and here is an incomplete list of crates to compromise to be part of the cargo build and that already have a build.rs so it doesn't stand out to much:
flate2
tar
curl-sys
libgit2-sys
openssl-sys
libsqlite3-sys
blake3
libz-sys
zstd-sys
cc
As a nice bonus - if you get rights for xz2 you can compromise rustup.
It's easy to be cynical because, yes, both the problems and solutions seem dead obvious in hindsight. But for a long time (and maybe even still), a hacker creed was "move fast and break things."
It's great that there's so much momentum in fixing the glaring problems with supply chain systems like npm, but I'm concerned that we're entering a new era of security-related problems caused in large part by agentic development.
I'm not just talking about Mythos/Glasswing surfacing vulnerabilities in pretty much everything it touches; I think the way we're developing software, pulling in dependencies, and potentially losing human thought modeling of complex systems is going to lead to a lot of hacked together software and infrastructure that humans won't fully understand.
I hope in a few years we don't look back at today and wonder how we could have been so naive -- how we failed to actually plan for the long-tail of AI development in a way that doesn't solve problems by attempting to just use AI to rebuild complex systems.
He certainly popularized it (maybe coined it), but I've seen a lot of organizations and developers repeat that mantra.
Even without the specific words, look to product teams debating tradeoffs of going to market vs. waiting for better security controls. They're pushing for faster product release every time, at pretty much every org.
Supply chain incidents suck and we need to do better. Personally for rust I’m a proponent of the foundation supporting a few core crates that go under the same audit procedure as the main rust language and give funding to the project to limit supply chain vulns. I don’t think the right answer is to remove systems like crates or npm. Crate and npm are a boon for many developers.
Crates has also been making efforts to include rust sec, but in addition to the above I would like the community to shy away from many small dependencies to a few larger ones just as tokio has
Honest question. Commons, Guava, Spring, and more seem to take this approach successfully (as in, the drawbacks are outweighed by the benefits in convenience, quality, and security) in Java. Are benefits in binary size really worth that complexity?
And before someone says “just have a better standard library”, think about why that is considered a solution here. Languages with a large and capable standard library remain more secure than the supply-chain fiascos on NPM because they have a) very large communities reviewing and participating in changes and b) have extremely regulated and careful release processes. Those things aren’t likely to be possible in most small community libraries.
Yeah I’d agree that multiple crates under one project is basically the same as 1 large crate. The real problem is how many people you’re trusting and it’s all coming from the same person.
One man's bloat is another man's batteries-included, I guess?
My argument would be that if a more featureful standard library could get Rust closer to the superior dependency culture of Go, it'd be worth it. As-is, Rust dependency trees are just wild.
Customers give us heat for not shipping the latest vulpine-lz4. Their AI-based heuristic antivirus total defence solution automatically flags all software not running latest versions of everything
I got a bit curious and here is an incomplete list of crates to compromise to be part of the cargo build and that already have a build.rs so it doesn't stand out to much:
flate2 tar curl-sys libgit2-sys openssl-sys libsqlite3-sys blake3 libz-sys zstd-sys cc
As a nice bonus - if you get rights for xz2 you can compromise rustup.
Fwiw at least they do track Cargo.lock
It's great that there's so much momentum in fixing the glaring problems with supply chain systems like npm, but I'm concerned that we're entering a new era of security-related problems caused in large part by agentic development.
I'm not just talking about Mythos/Glasswing surfacing vulnerabilities in pretty much everything it touches; I think the way we're developing software, pulling in dependencies, and potentially losing human thought modeling of complex systems is going to lead to a lot of hacked together software and infrastructure that humans won't fully understand.
I hope in a few years we don't look back at today and wonder how we could have been so naive -- how we failed to actually plan for the long-tail of AI development in a way that doesn't solve problems by attempting to just use AI to rebuild complex systems.
But the article was funny.
Was it? I thought Zuckerberg coined this horrible phrase.
Even without the specific words, look to product teams debating tradeoffs of going to market vs. waiting for better security controls. They're pushing for faster product release every time, at pretty much every org.
Got me seriously laughing... Such a troll.
Supply Chain problem(SCP)
Honest question. Commons, Guava, Spring, and more seem to take this approach successfully (as in, the drawbacks are outweighed by the benefits in convenience, quality, and security) in Java. Are benefits in binary size really worth that complexity?
And before someone says “just have a better standard library”, think about why that is considered a solution here. Languages with a large and capable standard library remain more secure than the supply-chain fiascos on NPM because they have a) very large communities reviewing and participating in changes and b) have extremely regulated and careful release processes. Those things aren’t likely to be possible in most small community libraries.
My argument would be that if a more featureful standard library could get Rust closer to the superior dependency culture of Go, it'd be worth it. As-is, Rust dependency trees are just wild.
Amateur.
Kindly advice
ahahaha like that fiverr cloudinary bucket leak that turned out to just be a UX issue, this has me rolling
and then become aware of each other
and then try to eliminate each other for decades
each escalating resource capture and writing new generations of better "AI"