crev - Code REView system that we desperately need

Status

• cargo-crev: implementation for Rust - ready
• other languages/ecosystems - in plans

Introduction

You're ultimately responsible for vetting your dependencies.

But in a world of NPM/PIP/Cargo/RubyGems - how do you do that? Can you keep up with ever-changing ecosystem?

crev is an actual code review system as opposed to typically practiced code-change review system.

crev is scalable, distributed and social. Users publish and circulate results of their reviews: potentially warning about problems, malicious code, or just encouraging high quality by peer review.

crev allows building a personal web of trust in people and code.

crev is a tool we desperately need yesterday. It protects against compromised dev accounts, intentional malicious code, typosquating, compromised package registries, or just plain poor quality.

Vision

We would like Crev to become a general, language and ecosystem agnostic system for establishing trust in Open Source code. We would like to have frontends integrated with all major Open Source package managers and ecosystems.

Consider joining crev gitter channel. Thank you!

Overview

Using crev you can generate cryptographically signed artifacts (Proofs). Proofs can contain:

• results of code reviews
• known advisories
• overall recomendations and comments.

Example of Package Review Proof that reviews a whole package (aka. library, crate, etc.):

-----BEGIN CREV PACKAGE REVIEW-----
version: -1
date: "2018-12-16T00:09:27.905713993-08:00"
from:
  id-type: crev
  id: 8iUv_SPgsAQ4paabLfs1D9tIptMnuSRZ344_M-6m9RE
  url: "https://github.com/dpc/crev-proofs"
package:
  source: "https://crates.io"
  name: default
  version: 0.1.2
  digest: RtL75KvBdj_Zk42wp2vzNChkT1RDUdLxbWovRvEm1yA
review:
  thoroughness: high
  understanding: high
  rating: positive
comment: "I'm the author, and this crate is trivial"
-----BEGIN CREV PACKAGE REVIEW SIGNATURE-----
QpigffpvOnK7KNdDzQSNRt8bkOFYP_LOLE-vOZ2lu6Je5jvF3t4VZddZDDnPhxaY9zEQurozqTiYAHX8nXz5CQ
-----END CREV PACKAGE REVIEW-----

Proofs are stored and published in personal repositories for other people to use.

Fundamental ideas behind crev:

• Not many people can review all their dependencies, but if every user at least skimmed through a couple of them, and shared that information with others, we would be in a much better situation.
• Trust is fundamentally about people and community, not automatic scans, arbitrary metrics, process or bureaucracy. People have to judge both: code (code coverage, testing, quality, etc.) and trustworthiness of other people (whose reviews do you trust, and how much).
• Code review tool should be language and ecosystem agnostic. Code is code, and should be reviewed.
• Trust should be spread between many people, so one compromised or malicious actor can't abuse the system.
• Web of Trust is personal and subjective: islands of Trust emerge spontaneously and overlap.

Links

• Crev FAQ
• "cargo-trust: Concept"