What is going on with serde? (social.treehouse.systems)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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So, serde seems to be downloading and running a binary on the system without informing the user and without any user consent. Does anyone have any background information on why this is, and how this is supposed to be a good idea?

dtolnay seems like a smart guy, so I assume there is a reason for this, but it doesn't feel ok at all.

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[-] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I saw some other crate doing something similar but using wasm, the idea is to sandbox the binary used as a proc macro. So that seems a bit better. Can't see to find it any more.

EDIT: Found it https://lib.rs/crates/watt

[-] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Fun fact: the guy who wrote watt is the same guy who wrote serde.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Made by the same guy

[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

serde is maintained by dtolnay, he is not the original author.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I thought he was a genious inventing so many useful tools. Does he maintain other projects he didn't create?

[-] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Not sure, possibly. You still need to be pretty smart maintaining and extending all those tools.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Sandboxing the binary doesn't protect you. It can still insert malicious code into your application.

this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023

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