Cargo Permissions

⚠️ This repository is just a POC

One of the core principles of Rust is safety. To keep a healthy repository of packages in crates.io we need to enforce as many as possible approaches to detect any kind of vulnerability.

Crates.io, as many other package repositories have the challenge to keep all the available packages in a reliable and secure way. Developers and users of these repositories put a lot of confidence in repository maintainers.

With the increased use of dependencies between packages, the risk of vulnerability propagation increases. A small security problem in a famous crate can lead to a huge problem in many projects. We have seen many security problems like this one in other platforms like NPM.

This package tries to minimize the impact of a known set of risky use cases, following the approach of source code analysis and dependency tree analysis. We can take advantage of the static analysis to understand what is going on a package under the hood.

The main idea for this project is to have a set of permissions associated with some specific list of standard packages. On the other hand, through an AST analysis, check the standard libraries used by a crate. For example, if a crate starts using std::net library, is going to acquire the net permission. All crates that use this other crate as dependency are going to acquire the net permission, indirectly though. This permission acquisition goes up to the last package.

Following this approach, we can build a dependency tree with all acquired permissions. This set of permissions are going to give as much information about packages we don't control.

With those permissions, we can answer those questions:

• Why a png library uses the network layer?
• Why a http library uses the file system layer?

This approach is inspired by permission systems in different platforms like:

• Feature policy
• Android permissions

Risky use cases

• Read unauthorized files
• Do requests to untrusted domains
• Execute unauthorized programs
• Stolen information
• Stolen CPU resources
• Execute code unsafely

Permissions

• fs: This crate uses the standard file system library
• net: This crate uses the standard network system library
• io: This crate uses the standard io system library
• process: This crate uses the standard process system library
• thread: This crate uses the standard thread system library
• unsafe: This crate uses unsafe code