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Surely non-sandboxed build scripts are just a terrible idea.

Both Cargo and npm should look at what Swift Package Manager (SPM) is doing.

It’s not perfect but there’s a noticeable absence of supply chain attacks involving SPM, probably partly because it doesn’t use a mutable registry, but I suspect attacks are just more difficult. On the rare occasion a build script is involved it’s run in a sandboxed plugin.



Why would a malicious library author limit their maliciousness to the build script?


They wouldn't, but build scripts are a particularly effective attack vector.


They won't, but the less attack vectors, the better.




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