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Debian Working on Reproducible Builds To Make Binaries Trustable
An anonymous reader writes: Debian's Jérémy Bobbio, also known as Lunar, spoke at the Chaos Communication Camp about the distribution's efforts to reassert trustworthiness for open source binaries after it was brought into question by various intelligence agencies. Debian is "working to bring reproducible builds to all of its more than 22,000 software packages," and is pushing the rest of the community to do the same. Lunar said, "The idea is to get reasonable confidence that a given binary was indeed produced by the source. We want anyone to be able to produce identical binaries from a given source (PDF)."
Here is Lunar's overview of how this works: "First you need to get the build to output the same bytes for a given version. But others also must to be able to set up a close enough build environment with similar enough software to perform the build. And for them to set it up, this environment needs to be specified somehow. Finally, you need to think about how rebuilds are performed and how the results are checked."
Here is Lunar's overview of how this works: "First you need to get the build to output the same bytes for a given version. But others also must to be able to set up a close enough build environment with similar enough software to perform the build. And for them to set it up, this environment needs to be specified somehow. Finally, you need to think about how rebuilds are performed and how the results are checked."
Yes it is difficult. That's why they are trying to solve the problem.
On the otherhand I don't quite understand why, if one can compile the source, one needs to worry about untrusted binaries. Perhaps the intent here is for some master agency to watch for tinkered binaries or to post it's own Checksums apart from Debian. Then everyone has two sources for validated checksums.
Almost right, except without the master agency. This isn't for the incredibly paranoid types who would already be compiling from source. This is for the rest of us, the lazy people who would rather "apt-get install foo" and just assume the distro's doing things right. If the builds are reproducible then eventually someone's going to verify them. If no variations are discovered, the rest of us lazy masses can be a lot more confident that we're not running anything unexpected.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.