Showerthought: Rust Foundation Audited Crates

68 points idajourney

This is in no way a fully fleshed-out idea and I apologize if it's been suggested before, but: what if the Rust Foundation added an ability for them to mark crates "audited" on crates.io. Not as in a full security audit, but as a "a Rust professional has checked that this crate does not appear to contain malicious code" indicator. Then, a feature could be added to Cargo to only add audited (versions of) crates. The auditor(s) would be someone employed by the Rust Foundation, and companies/projects could:

  • Pay for their own crate to be audited, or
  • Sponsor a crate they depend on to be audited.

Both would be appealing to companies in that it's a way for them to publicly contribute to the Rust Foundation and help the ecosystem out (and potentially make their own projects look good), and would be a benefit to projects concerned about supply-chain attacks. It wouldn't interfere with any of the current uses of crates.io, and would be strictly additive in terms of features (and obviously anyone could continue to publish as they do right now). It would also be a source of income for the foundation. Thoughts? Maybe the cost of paying for someone to do that is just too high compared to the benefit to the groups who could actually pay for it?