Re:Ask HN: Language design to mitigate supply chain attacks?
by verdverm on Monday October 25, 2021 @01:00PM
(#28990214)
Go's dependency management is pretty sophisticated w.r.t. mitigating supply chain attacks.
I'm working on a post about it
Re:Ask HN: Language design to mitigate supply chain attacks?
by warrenm on Monday October 25, 2021 @01:40PM
(#28990759)
That's not a language thing, though - that's a dependency management thing :)
Re:Ask HN: Language design to mitigate supply chain attacks?
by verdverm on Monday October 25, 2021 @01:57PM
(#28990998)
It's both, for example parsing an import string, or what makes a valid module name, are part of the language. These have restrictions that prevent Unicode glyph attacks.
The fact that imports require a domain name prefix prevents dependency confusion.
Re:Ask HN: Language design to mitigate supply chain attacks?
by warrenm on Thursday October 28, 2021 @08:22AM
(#29025200)
All the language (and really the interpreter/compiler) is doing in this example is making sure you haven't done something silly like try to assign a `char ` to a `long double`
That's barely* addressing supply chain attacks
Linguistically, an import of `bubbleglyph.myimport` is no different than `bubbleglypf.myimport` (except for one [valid] character) - nor would importing it from repository A be any different than repository B
You sitll have to rely on outside-the-language security checks to ensure you're getting
1) what you want
2) from where you want
3) and that it's "correct"/"safe" to use
Because you mention supply-chain attacks, I assume you're familiar with Nix/Guix linux distributions/package managers?