Not only that, but even just the act of building a dependency is unsafe as dependencies can specify build scripts (which is just Rust code that's compiled and executed prior to building the crate).
"waiting for a takedown notice :P"
This of course raises the question: what if someone puts some malware in a crate?
Do decentralized web of trust schemes actually work? What are the precedents? AFAIK, only centralized webs of trust work, and even those still leak around the edges and take some degree of active policing to defend. Basically, someone (or maybe a few competing someones) with authority establishes a canonical boundary and publishes a canonical list.
How can you claim that? Looking at most tech we have today, it becomes readily apparent that most technology needs multiple iterations before achieving wide adoption. Web of trust is no exception.
The lack of a widely-adopted precedent implying that some tech is forever poor is a sloppy conclusion to make.
Yes, but decentralized webs of trust have been tried before, and the "flat" ones with no centralization fade away or become hipster tchotkes. I think it's a valuable question to ask. Have we done the analyses for why the previous ones didn't work?
Cargo makes it very easy to add dependencies. Rust has the same culture of small, single-purpose libraries as npm (there is https://crates.io/crates/left_pad if you're wondering).
This of course raises the question: what if someone puts some malware in a crate? Cargo itself has an OK security (and working on more end-to-end integrity checks), so it's unlikely that someone will inject malware into existing crates, but that still leaves question of trusting the original crate authors.
Rust is not a sandbox language. Even the "safe" subset of the language is still just about preventing bugs, but nowhere near a watertight sandbox required to protect programmers and users from straight-up malware running in their own program. It's not clear if that is even possible in an efficient, low-level systems programming language.
So the most reasonable way forward is to ensure that all code you use is either from people you trust, or has been verified by you or someone you trust.
Turning code reviews into a shareable artifact is a pretty cool addition here, as it reduces duplication of work across the community (you don't have to review everything personally), and helps you pick and choose who you trust.