Just some random Cargo security-related issues I noticed:
- No strong link between the repo and the published code.
- Many crates were spammed that were just a wrapper around a popular C/C++ library. There's no indication of this, so... "surprise!"... your compiled app is now more unsafe C/C++ code than Rust.
- Extensive name squatting, to the point that virtual no library uses the obvious name, because someone else got to it first. The aformentioned C/C++ libraries were easy to spit out, so they often grabbed the name before a Rust rewrite could be completed and published. So you now go to Cargo to find a Rust library for 'X' and you instead have to use 'X-rs' because... ha-ha, it's actually a C/C++ package manager with some Rust crates in there also.
- Transitive dependencies aren't shown in the web page.
- No enforcement or indication of safe/unsafe libs, nostd, etc...
- No requirement for MFA, which was a successful attack vector on multiple package managers in the past.
DISCLAIMER: Some of the above may have been resolved since I last looked. Other package managers also do these things (but that's not a good thing).
In my opinion, any package manager that just lets any random person upload "whatever" is outright dangerous and useless to the larger ecosystem of developers in a hurry who don't have the time to vet every single transitive dependency every month.
Package managers need to grow up and start requiring a direct reference to a specific Git commit -- that they store themselves -- and compile from scratch with an instrumented compiler that spits out metadata such as "connects to the Internet, did you know?" or "is actually 99% C++ code, by the way".