gabegoodhart

Yep, this is spot on. As written, import_tracker does indeed do a dynamic import of the library in question and you're right that this introduces the possibility of arbitrary code execution. Currently, import_tracker is designed for library authors where the library in question is a trusted library that has dependency sprawl.

It's a very interesting use case to consider how a similar solution could work as a sandbox for investigating supply chain concerns with third-party libraries that have transitive dependencies. I think some of the static analysis tools referenced in other comments would address this better since the real concern there is detecting the presence of transitive dependencies which may be malicious as opposed to identifying exactly where in the target library those dependencies are used.

Makes sense! I think the commenter below correctly addressed the true security concern here which is importing arbitrary python libraries. As is, import_tracker doesn't attempt to solve this problem (though it's an interesting one to consider for this or a similar library). Please feel free to reach out with any other questions if you're curious.

Hi, I'm the main author of import_tracker. Thanks for taking the time to dig into it! It's a really interesting point that the subproces.Popen could itself be a security concern. The command that's being executed is executing the __main__ of the import_tracker library itself (which is not something that a user can't configure), so is your concern that import_tracker itself is untrusted and might be a concern for users running this on their machines?

For context on why I'm using the suprocess here, this allows the tracking to correctly allocate dependencies that are imported more than once (think my_lib.submod1 and my_lib.submod2 both need tensorflow, but my_lib.submod3 doesn't).