rtx is a convenient tool to manage developer tools, however its model is also open to potential risks. The following are major areas of rtx and the security considerations currently being made and what needs to be made in the future.
Please open a ticket or send me an email if you have thoughts on how rtx can be made more secure.
Development of the "core CLI" is done on jdxcode/rtx which only a single developer (me, @jdxcode) has access to. Other contributors may only submit contributions via public Pull Requests. By reducing the number of developers with access down to 1 reduces the chance of keys being leaked greatly.
This does create a bus factor problem. If I suddenly died one day or otherwise wasn't able to continue development at all there are some successors listed in my GitHub account that can take over my account if need be.
The dependencies in the core CLI are a security vector. I've tried to be reasonably judicious about what dependencies to allow into the project. I only select dependencies with broad usage across the Rust community where possible. I'm open to PRs or suggestions on reducing dependency count even at the cost of functionality because it will make rtx more secure.
rtx.pub is the asset host for rtx. It's used to host precompiled rtx CLI binaries, and hosts a "VERSION" which rtx uses to occasionally check for a new version being released. Currently this is hosted with a mix of 3 different vendors for CDN, assets, and domain registration. This will be brought down to a single vendor to reduce the surface area for security reasons.
Plugins are by far the biggest source of potential problems and where the most work still needs to be made.
Eventually we will have 3 types of plugins:
- core - plugins that will be hardcoded into the CLI. These will be official plugins for the most common languages.
- community - plugins in the rtx-plugins GitHub Org. For now these will only have @jdxcode as the sole contributor, however this may change in the future for particular plugins with dedicated owners/collaborators. If you'd like your plugin to be moved here, ask me about it.
- external - plugins owned by other parties, these include plugins in the shorthand registry. These are no more secure than installing any random tool from the internet.
Just because a plugin is inside of the shorthand registry (so you can run rtx install foo@, does not mean
I vouch for it. I have no idea who almost anyone that builds those plugins is. If it's coming from the rtx-plugins
GitHub org, you can have more trust in it. (See the owners with rtx plugins ls-remote --urls).
Over time we should be able to move more plugins into being fully maintained by rtx. I plan to add an
RTX_PARANOID=1 env var that, when set, will make changes to make rtx behave as securely as possible
(e.g.: only using core plugins, only allowing plugins that use GPG verification of assets).
Currently the only "phoning home" that rtx does is with the weekly check for new versions. It does not send any
data (except its version), but using the IP address I'm able to infer some (very) broad usage data for rtx. You
may opt out of this behavior with RTX_HIDE_UPDATE_WARNING=1. You can also audit the code
yourself to see what it does.
I would like to see some basic, but public analytics information. I think homebrew did a great job of doing this, and we'd have a similar model where the data is anonymous and publicly accessible. Doing so will help both me and plugin authors to know if we're building effective functionality. It's also a great way to get buy-in from organizations to do development with rtx (especially at large tech companies—they all love numbers).
The only supported version is the most recent one.
Send an email to security@<RTX_DOMAIN_IN_README>.pub
If you want, you may encrypt the message with GPG:
@jdxcode's public key
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