r/programming 12d ago

Supply chain attack on arrayref

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

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114

u/piesou 12d ago edited 12d 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.

53

u/AyrA_ch 12d ago edited 12d 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.

49

u/svick 12d ago

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

23

u/Thorlius 12d 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.

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u/smalls1652 12d ago

Funnily enough, the creator of Newtonsoft.Json was hired by Microsoft back in 2018. From what I remember he's not on the team that created/maintains System.Text.Json though.

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u/yanitrix 12d ago

I mean there are a lot of third-party packages used frequently. Things for testing, validation, some utilities like humanizer, masstransit/nservicebus, etc. Even larger ui projects like avalonia or uno are out there.

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u/jcotton42 12d 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.

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u/FullPoet 12d ago

Thats not true - theres a lot of third party packages. I think theyre are are just more complete.

So your test project will reference MS packages, TUnit, Moq and maybe something else. You can probably skip Moq.