Know the exact crate versions used to build your Rust executable. Audit binaries for known bugs or security vulnerabilities in production, at scale, with zero bookkeeping.
This works by embedding data about the dependency tree in JSON format into a dedicated linker section of the compiled executable.
The implementation has gotten to the point where it's time to get some real-world experience with it, but the data format is not yet stable. Linux, Windows and Mac OS are currently supported.
The end goal is to get Cargo itself to encode this information in binaries. There is an RFC for an implementation within Cargo, for which this project paves the way: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/2801
```bash
cargo install cargo-auditable rust-audit-info
cd your_project
cargo auditable build --release
rust-audit-info target/release/your-project ```
In a word, no. The embedded dependency list uses under 5kB even on large dependency trees with 400+ entries. This typically translates to between 1/1000 and 1/10,000 of the size of the binary.
syft v0.53.0+ has experimental support for detecting this data in binaries.
When used on images or directories, Rust audit support must be enabled by adding the --catalogers all CLI option, e.g syft --catalogers all <container image containing Rust auditable binary>.
go-rustaudit is golang binary for parsing Rust audit information from binaries, used in syft.
It is also interoperable with existing tooling that consumes Cargo.lock via the JSON-to-TOML convertor. You can also write your own tooling fairly easily - auditable-extract and auditable-serde crates handle all the data extraction and parsing for you. See the docs to get started.
It is not yet stabilized, so we do not have extensive docs or a JSON schema. However, these Rust data structures map to JSON one-to-one and are extensively commented. The JSON is Zlib-compressed and placed in a linker section named .dep-v0.
Yes. The data format is designed for interoperability with alternative implementations. You can also use pre-existing platform-specific tools or libraries for data extraction. E.g. on Linux:
bash
objcopy --dump-section .dep-v0=/dev/stdout target/release/hello-auditable | pigz -zd -
However, don't run legacy tools on untrusted files. Use the auditable-extract crate or the rust-audit-info command-line tool if possible - they are written in 100% safe Rust, so they will not have such vulnerabilities.
Embedded platforms where you cannot spare a byte should not add anything in the executable. Instead they should record the hash of every executable in a database and associate the hash with its Cargo.lock, compiler and LLVM version, build date, etc. This would make for an excellent Cargo wrapper or plugin. Since that can be done in a 5-line shell script, writing that tool is left as an exercise to the reader.
The data format is designed not to disrupt reproducible builds. It contains no timestamps, and the generated JSON is sorted to make sure it is identical between compilations. If anything, this helps with reproducible builds, since you know all the versions for a given binary now.
The list of enabled features is the only newly disclosed information.
All URLs and file paths are redacted, but the crate names, feature names and versions are recorded as-is. At present panic messages already disclose all this info and more, except feature names. Also, chances are that you're legally obligated have to disclose use of specific open-source crates anyway, since MIT and many other licenses require it.
It's already there, in the .rustc section. Run strings your_executable | grep 'rustc version' to see it. Don't try this on files you didn't compile yourself - strings is overdue for a rewrite in a memory-safe language.
Good question. I don't think they are exposed in any reasonable way right now. Would be a great addition, but not required for the initial launch. We can add it later in a backwards-compatible way.
We need to get some real-world experience with this before committing to a stable data format.
If you're looking to use it, we'd be happy to hear about your requirements so that we can accommodate them!