Posted by robalni 6 hours ago
giant leap for mankind.
I also asked Gemini whether we express ourselves that way in my mother tongue (Mandarin), and yes, we do, but it came off as being too formal way of speaking. We don't normally use it (I'm not from China/Taiwan though)
What is a win is that two independent parties can run the same build, and get the same binaries.
This is important because it removes trust from builders: anyone can verify their output.
It just so happens that unimportant things like build versions impede that.
They're still a pragmatic choice for many usecases.
Given how many quick & dirty sed patching or exec commands I've seen in the few nix package/modules I've read, I would not exactly bet my life on it being completely idempotent & reproducible.
Maybe not by itself, but it does allow for the ecosystem to be audited, in a way that ultimately benefits the end-user. It really is an important part of a healthy supply chain.
This is nice pat yourself on the back achievement for people that prefer security theatre and checking boxes than doing something actually useful, and they wasted thousands man hours of poor victims that had to implement it
Curious, what distros where affected by npm supply chain attacks?
Here is jujutsu’s list of dependencies[0] and their hashes[1]. As an aside, that’s why I don’t like those packages managers. Something like Python’s numpy or lib curl, get sliced into atomic portions.
[0]: https://github.com/openbsd/ports/blob/master/devel/jujutsu/c...
[1]: https://github.com/openbsd/ports/blob/master/devel/jujutsu/d...
Not being able to see if the source code shipped is the same as been used for creating the binary is scary
There are plenty of places in industrial computing where reproducible builds have prevented subterfuge within the organizations themselves. Injecting binaries to do inf-/exfiltration is a long-standing industrial espionage activity which is of immense value to all users of the operating system - not just the consumer users.
Less diligent projects had it but there are easier ways to fix it
Reproducable builds are not solving all issues as you rightly observed, but they can be a stepping stone (or even a pre-condition) for further measures.
The thing reproducible builds aim to prevent is Debian or individual developers and system administrators with access rights to binary uploads and signing keys to get forced to sign and upload binary packages by attackers - be these governments (with or without court orders) or criminal organizations.
As of now, say if I were an administrator of Debian's CI infrastructure, technically there would be nothing preventing me from running an "extra" job on the CI infrastructure building a package for openssh with a knock-knock backdoor, properly signing it and uploading it to the repository. For someone to spot the attack and differentiate it, they'd have to notice that there is a package in the repository that has no corresponding build logs or has issues otherwise.
But with reproducible builds, anyone can set up infrastructure to rebuild Debian packages from source automatically and if there is a mismatch with what is on Debian's repository, raise alarm bells.
Indeed, this could mitigate an attacker replacing the binary with something that's not produced from the code, but it does not mitigate the tool chain or code itself containing the exploit, creating a malicious binary.
The end-user experience is that now you can host your Debian binaries in caches and CDNs without worrying about supply chain hackers.
You can verify that file hashes match the ones on Debian's website and sleep much better at night.
If you don't trust Debian's website then you can rebuild yourself and check if Debian has been compromised.