It is safe to say that it is unrealistic to expect that developers in the real world audit their dependencies. I'd imagine a feasible solution being a permissi

It is safe to say that it is unrealistic to expect that developers in the real world audit their dependencies. I'd imagine a feasible solution being a permission-based system (which might already exist), where programs and their dependencies do not have access to certain facilities, like the filesystem, other processes or the network, without them being declared in a manifest file of sorts. Permissions should be inheritable when explicitly specified, and a sub-dependency could not gain a permission it didn't inherit from its parent. Unfortunately this does not work so well with a shell, since the shell needs the ability to spawn arbitrary processes. At least the shell itself would not have network access, forcing it to rely on tools already installed in the system Also, if we resort to some magical wishful thinking, then all the tools in the system follow this permission model and the package manager is aware of the permissions. You could then query the package manager for all installed software with a certain capability, like network access, disabling tools like curl and netcat.