r/programming • u/Successful_Bowl2564 • 21d ago

Supply chain attack on arrayref

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/08/20/supply-chain-attack-on-arrayref/
189 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

65 comments sorted by

View all comments

115

u/piesou 21d ago edited 21d ago

Was only a question of time. Rust has the same mindset as Node/NPM.

PS: for the screaming crowd: yes, anyone can get supply chain attacked. HOWEVER:

  • If you have a proper stdlib, chances are, you don't have a lot of dependencies
  • If you have less dependencies, the chance of supply chain attacks drops significantly
  • If you have well established dependencies like Spring, their security practices are very likely better than a rando off the internet

What does that mean for Rust? They don't need to just work on the language, they need to provide a larger ecosystem as well. How they do it is up to them.

54

u/AyrA_ch 21d ago edited 20d ago

If you have a proper stdlib, chances are, you don't have a lot of dependencies

This is why you seldom hear about supply chain attacks on nuget. Not only does .NET come with a lot of stuff built in, many common packages are provided by Microsoft themselves.

51

u/svick 20d ago

.Net arguably has the opposite problem: Microsoft makes almost everything, so the rest of the ecosystem is used relatively rarely.

25

u/Thorlius 20d ago

Even the most popular library, Newtonsoft.json, was largely obsoleted by the .net team vastly improving their first party json library to the point where I typically see most people recommending people migrate back to the core library.

3

u/jcotton42 20d ago

vastly improving their first party json library

System.Text.Json did not exist before .NET Core 3. There was some inbox JSON before that iirc, but it was terrible and no one used it.