Hacker News Reader

Comment by LegionMammal978 | Hacker News Reader

> What also makes this situation peculiar to me is that it's being immediately rushed into Cargo proper instead of the usual way these tools are handled by the Cargo team (i.e. allowing multiple ideas to compete as third-party tools and maybe choosing one once a winner is clear).

This tool isn't being pushed into Cargo proper, and I doubt it will be any time soon. Instead, it is a third-party crate called "cargo-vet". If an executable named "cargo-whatever" is in the search path, Cargo can invoke it as a subcommand "cargo whatever". See Cargo's docs for more info: https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/external-tools.htm...

View on HN

hopefully nobody adds a cargo-buidl package then!

You need to explicitly install these tools, so you can't "accidentally" invoke cargo-buidl from a transitive dependency or anything.

It's not like a tool like npx which will allow you to invoke code in arbitrary packages.

yeah it's great that "cargo buidl" doesn't automatically try to download and install cargo-buidl but if cargo-buidl somehow ends up in your $PATH (perhaps installed as a side effect of another package or even some other package manager like pip) then it will run. Though I guess someone could also just as easily put a malicious cargo in your $PATH and that will work in most cases, depending on precedence...

Why would a user install a cargo-buidl package when cargo build already works?

Typosquatting is definitely an issue, but not in this specific case.

The binary can be named that without the package being named so, so it seems it could happen

If an intruder can rename files in your $PATH, the defense is already broken (e.g. they could do the same with any of .bashrc, .profile, anything in .local/bin and many, many other places). If a program can run seemingly innocent programs like less or sed, it already can run arbitrary commands.

Security story of developing on Linux is basically non-existent unless you do everything on a remote machine or at least in a container (and, oh irony: direct access from your user to the Docker daemon basically means having root for that user).

Well I was thinking that "cargo install foo" can already install cargo-buidl in your path by innocent means i.e. no Rust build script.

But with build scripts (build.rs) any crate indeed has arbitrary code execution at build time, so they can't be trusted, like you imply.

However, sandboxing might be coming for build scripts, and when that's done, the typo attack is still there (package "foo" installing cargo-buidl).

right, but cargo-buidl could be installed as part of a different package that also provides a more useful-sounding binary, no?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com