Sharing certifications

How could users gain trust that a build has not been compromised by exchanging certifications attesting that they all have been able to get the same build results?

Debian is thinking of allowing multiple Debian Developers to upload signatures attesting that they have been able to reproduce a build.

The question is also related to the work lead by Ben Laurie on binary transparency. The idea is to have an append-only log similar to Certificate Transparency which could be used to authenticate binaries.

More research is required in this area to make reproducible builds more effective in detecting compromise early.

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Introduction

• Definitions
• History
• Buy-in
• Making plans
• Academic publications

Achieve deterministic builds

• commandments of reproducible builds
• Variations in the build environment
• SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH
• Deterministic build systems
• Volatile inputs can disappear
• Stable order for inputs
• Value initialization
• Version information
• Timestamps
• Timezones
• Locales
• Archive metadata
• Stable order for outputs
• Randomness
• Build path
• System images
• JVM

Define a build environment

• What's in a build environment?
• Recording the build environment
• Definition strategies
• Proprietary operating systems

Distribute the environment

• Building from source
• Virtual machine drivers
• Formal definition

Verification

• Cryptographic checksums
• Embedded signatures
• Sharing certifications
• Rebuilders

Specifications

• SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH
• BUILD_PATH_PREFIX_MAP (WIP)