Rust audit-check Action

Security vulnerabilities audit

This GitHub Action is using cargo-audit to perform an audit for crates with security vulnerabilities.

Usage

Audit changes

We can utilize the GitHub Actions ability to execute workflow only if the specific files were changed and execute this Action to check the changed dependencies:

name: Security audit
on:
  push:
    paths: 
      - '**/Cargo.toml'
      - '**/Cargo.lock'
jobs:
  security_audit:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: rustsec/[email protected]
        with:
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

It is recommended to add the paths: section into the workflow file, as it would effectively speed up the CI pipeline, since the audit process will not be performed if no dependencies were changed.

In case of any security advisories found, status check created by this Action will be marked as "failed".
Note that informational advisories are not affecting the check status.

Granular Permissions

These are the typically used permissions:

name: 'rust-audit-check'
github-token:
  action-input:
    input: token
    is-default: false
  permissions:
    issues: write
    issues-reason: to create issues
    checks: write
    checks-reason: to create check

The action does not raise issues when it is not triggered from a "cron" scheduled workflow.

When running the action as scheduled it will crate issues but e.g. in PR / push fails the action.

Limitations

Due to token permissions, this Action WILL NOT be able to create Checks for Pull Requests from the forked repositories, see actions-rs/clippy-check#2 for details.
As a fallback this Action will output all found advisories to the stdout.
It is expected that this behavior will be fixed later by GitHub.

Scheduled audit

Another option is to use schedule event and execute this Action periodically against the HEAD of repository default branch.

name: Security audit
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 0 * * *'
jobs:
  audit:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: rustsec/[email protected]
        with:
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

With this example Action will be executed periodically at midnight of each day and check if there any new advisories appear for crate dependencies.
For each new advisory (including informal) an issue will be created:

Inputs

Name	Required	Description	Type	Default
token	✓	GitHub token, usually a ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}	string
ignore		Comma-separated list of advisory ids to ignore	string
working-directory		The directory of the Cargo.toml / Cargo.lock files to scan.	string	.