Skip to contents

Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

pkgaudit 0.4.0

  • pkgaudit now accounts for every file it can identify as code, in a new coverage frame, and says what it made of each one: parsed, matched, exportable, unexamined, or error. A clean scan can be checked rather than trusted, because the scan states what it did not read.
  • export_unscanned() writes the code pkgaudit cannot read – C, C++, Fortran, Rust, Python, JavaScript – into a directory a scanner such as Semgrep can be pointed at, blank-padded so line numbers still point into the original file.
  • emit_sarif() renders a result as SARIF 2.1.0, so findings open on the line they were found in any editor or code-scanning platform that reads it. Every result carries level note: pkgaudit does not rank findings, and when a finding’s code runs is carried in properties.phases.
  • The description rule no longer claims at_build and at_check. Measured against R 4.6.1, R CMD build, check and INSTALL all refuse an Authors@R field containing anything outside person, as.person, c, list, paste and paste0, and the check recurses into arguments, so none of the seventeen expressions tried executed. The field is still not inert: desc evaluates it with no allowlist, so reading a package’s authors – or printing a desc object – runs whatever it holds. That is developer tooling rather than a lifecycle phase, so the rule now declares no phases and says why.
  • The data_serialized rule no longer claims .Rdata, .RDS and .Rds files under data/. Measured against R 4.6.1, a file with one of those extensions is never deserialized: R CMD INSTALL copies it into the installed package untouched rather than moving it into the lazy-load database, no object from it is reachable once the namespace loads, and R CMD check reports it under “Files not of a type allowed in a ‘data’ directory”.
  • Inline R in an .Rmd or .qmd – `r system("id")`, and Quarto’s `{r} system("id")` – is now read. It runs when the vignette is rendered, at R CMD build and again under R CMD check, and was previously skipped without being reported as skipped. Findings carry the line and column the expression occupies in the source. The same rewrite fixed the Sweave extractor, which read only the first \Sexpr{} on a line. Everywhere knitr evaluates is read: inline R in the YAML front matter, the `r#expr` spelling, chunks inside blockquotes, and Sweave chunks ended by an @ %def x line, which previously swallowed the rest of the file.
  • Quarto chunk options are honoured: a chunk suppressed with #| eval: false is marked guarded, as one marked eval=FALSE in its header already was. A document-wide execute: eval: false is still not read.
  • Extraction and analysis dispatch on two independent axes: a file’s type decides how it is read, a segment’s language decides how it is analysed. Both axes are exported – extract_segments() and analyze_segment(), with new_segment() and new_findings() to build what a method returns – so a file format or a language can be added from another package rather than only by editing this one.
  • audit_package(), audit_tarball(), emit_sarif() and export_unscanned() report a bad argument by naming it. Passing a path that does not exist now says `path` is not an existing directory rather than dir.exists(path) is not TRUE.
  • Rules reach parity across R and shell, and the rule set roughly doubles: decoding, interpreters, software installation, sockets, credential files, file-permission changes – Sys.chmod(), fs::file_chmod(), chmod – and persistence via startup files are now caught in both.
  • A finding’s phases are resolved from both the file context it sits in and the code context within that file, rather than from one flattened namespace. patterns$code_context now reports only where code sits inside its file: top_level, in_function, a lifecycle hook, or a part of a help file. The contexts named for locations – data, demo, exec, tests, tools, citation, Rprofile, vignettes – are gone, since file_context already says where the file sits. R and Other are renamed top_level and in_function; Other always meant code inside a function definition, and now says so.
  • Code inside a function definition inherits the phases of the code around it, except under R/. A helper called by a test file reports at_check instead of nothing, which is an under-report this release fixes: findings move out of "none" and never into it.
  • Rd_examples and the three Rd_Sexpr_* contexts are rules rather than constants in the package, matched on a label the extractor stamps rather than on an XPath. Every context a finding can carry is now defined by a rule, with its own version, message and examples.
  • A file-context rule names the code-context rules that can apply inside it, replacing the namespace_source flag, and carries assume_called: whether code inside a function definition there is taken to run when the code around it runs. There are exactly two measured answers, so it is a flag rather than a set of phases – a rule can choose between the two measurements but cannot state a third.
  • Every phase pkgaudit reports is measured by an instrumented probe package, including both readings of a function body: one called from top-level code, which fires wherever that code does, and one nothing calls, which fires nowhere. A rule that overrides in_function is choosing between two measurements rather than asserting something unmeasured. The probe now covers tests/testthat/, inst/tinytest/ and inst/unitTests/, which previously rested on inference from plain tests/, and confirms that a .onLoad defined outside R/ never fires. It also measures the Rd example wrappers, which is why only \dontrun{} is reported as guarded: \dontshow{} and \testonly{} run under any example run, and \donttest{} runs under R CMD check --as-cran.
  • Indirect calls are attributed to the rule that owns the name, so do.call("system", ...) reports as a system finding – including when the target is passed by name, as in do.call(args = list("id"), what = "system").
  • A symlinked file is never followed. Scanning it would attribute its target’s code to a path the package does not ship, so it is reported in coverage as unexamined with reason symlink instead. audit_tarball() already refused archives carrying symlinks; directory scans now state what they skipped.
  • validate_tar() refuses bzip2-, xz-, zstd- and compress-compressed archives by their magic bytes, whatever the filename says. gzfile() would otherwise decompress them silently, and only gzip’s bounded expansion keeps the decompression-bomb ratio cap meaningful.
  • Four vignettes, one audience each: getting started, R package security, rule coverage, and internals – the last with a call graph derived from pkgaudit’s own parse trees, so it cannot fall behind the code.
  • Every documented function’s examples run, against untrustedpkg, the small package pkgaudit ships to be scanned. Nothing is held back behind \dontrun{}, so R CMD check exercises the documentation.
  • The Path: line in print() and summary() output writes the home directory as ~, so a report can be shared without disclosing a username while still saying which copy was scanned. path = FALSE still omits the line.
  • Testing follows a stated principle rather than a coverage target: every documented function has a happy path, every stop(), warning() and handler is reached by a test, and anything reading untrusted bytes or writing to disk is tested adversarially. The principle is in CONTRIBUTING.md.

pkgaudit 0.3.0

A redesign. 0.2.0 matched specific function calls inside lifecycle hooks; 0.3.0 replaced that with independent rule categories that compose.

  • Rules split into file contexts (files R executes during build, check or install), code contexts (where R code runs), and patterns (security-relevant calls), so a capability and the moment it runs are described separately rather than enumerated as pairs.
  • Every finding carries the lifecycle phases it runs in – at_build, at_install_src, at_load and their kin – which is what distinguishes code that executes on library() from code that runs only when someone calls it.
  • audit_package() and audit_tarball() return a pkgaudit object: ordinary data frames plus scan metadata, with print() and summary() methods.
  • The rules ship in a SQLite database verified against a SHA-256 sidecar on every load, and validate_tar() and hash_manifest() establish provenance before a scan runs.
  • Relicensed under Apache 2.0.

pkgaudit 0.2.0