The difference here is that it happens when you open the project in the editor. If I'm suspicious of some code my first reaction would be to open it my editor and inspect it.
The ESLint extension always asks whether you trust the `eslint` executable before it's enabled. It's still quite easy to click "allow" without thinking about it, but at least you'll have a choice to not execute potentially random code.
I suspect the same problem exists in many other languages. How can you open a CMake project without executing it?
This simply isn’t true. All of these require an action by a user to execute the command (e.g npm install, make build). What the author is claiming is that a typical rust LSP setup will execute the arbitrary macro code simply by viewing the file in certain IDEs.
Feel free to show me an example of this in makefiles or npm and I’m happy to retract.
VS warns you with a confirmation dialog that shouldn't just be ignored because "I just want to look and not compile". So, don't open any random .csproj or .sln and assume you are safe.
Languages with similar risks are ones where a Repl is is the key form of development. In those scenarios you are also one bad dependency from stolen info.
Just as it turns out that matter and energy are almost the same thing seen from a different point of view, it's the same with code and data. Running code and processing data are no different to a computer.
You think a picture of a dog and a Windows program are plainly different kinds of things, the computer does not agree.
Something like Wuffs † aims to at least control the blast radius. If (in some alternate or far future world) you were only ever looking at pictures of a dog via Wuffs, you could at least feel confident that doing so did not have some entirely unforeseen consequences, like exfiltrating your SSH private keys. Today you certainly can't be sure of that, none of the tools you use have such a cautious approach.
Of course, I bet a lot of people don’t bother to read any of the source code of a program that they’ve downloaded anyway.
Same is true of `npm install`, deb/rpm/etc packages, etc: you don't have proof what was distributed to you matches up with what was in VCS.
You can read the code before it runs and solve the "curl could fail" theoretical arguments by just.. removing `| sh` and examining + running yourself.
Of course you can break the curl|sh into separate steps and check that the script isn’t malicious before you run it, but the fact that you have to do that makes it a bad idea to distribute software this way. If you were told to download an installation script, inspect it, and only then to run it then there would be less of a problem. curl|sh is yet another sign that we so often prefer convenience over reliability and safety.
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/executing-build-file-in-...
(For example, Emacs realised that 'local eval' wasn't a good thing to have enabled globally in Emacs 19, in 1994, and spent the next decade or more closing many other loopholes involving local variables specified directly in files.)
If modern editors and IDEs are no longer thinking that way, I think that's a mistake.
VALUE := $(shell touch /tmp/something)¹ https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh/blob/master/Completion/Unix...
Many IDEs also do this for other languages (e.g. by running make), and the same problem applies.
This can be done even easier without users having to use a macro: with `build.rs` build scripts, which are run by default. So all you'd need is to compromise some popular dependency with a custom build.rs
Many other languages have the same (or at least similar) problem (Makefiles, npm hooks, ...)
There is an interesting proposal and prototype for compiling proc macros to WASM so they can be run in a sandbox: https://github.com/dtolnay/watt
But in the end it doesn't make that much difference: nothing prevents a random library from just reading your secrets and calling curl to send it to a server at runtime.
Build time execution is definitely an additional attack vector.
But if you use a third party dependency, you have to trust it or review all it's code for every version. There is no way around this, and it's true for any language.