Hm, interesting. One way to solve this would be to have a language with a very rigid import system - it should be _impossible_ for a library to use a module it hasn't imported, even if that module has been loaded elsewhere in a process. This is probably harder than it looks, and many languages have introspection features that are incompatible with this goal.
With a rigid import system, each library would be forced to declare what it's going to import (including any system libraries), and then you could e.g. enforce a warning + confirmation any time an updated dependency changes its import list.
It doesn't prevent you from getting owned by a modified privileged library, but it's better than the current case. Unfortunately, it probably requires some language (re-)design to fully implement this approach.
With a rigid import system, each library would be forced to declare what it's going to import (including any system libraries), and then you could e.g. enforce a warning + confirmation any time an updated dependency changes its import list.
It doesn't prevent you from getting owned by a modified privileged library, but it's better than the current case. Unfortunately, it probably requires some language (re-)design to fully implement this approach.