Collaborative Working Sessions - Distributed verification III
Evaluation criteria
Must Have
Must scale
- Reduce the build cost of reproducible everything by sharing over a pool
- Tooling and infra to append multi-party reproducibility verification scale
- Distributed reproducible monitoring #scale #infra
Must be be resilient against
- outages
- disagreements
- corruption
- malicious rebuilder
Must be possible to delegate trust to another party or parties in a limited controlled matter
- I want to trust the published artifact because someone trustworthy reproduced it
- Delegation implies recursion
- Understanding web of trust
- Users downloading software want to verify that the software has been built by multiple trusted people
- “5 out of 7” is possibly good enough
- Distributing / sharing trust
- Software updater should check that the available update has been built by multiple trusted builders
- I want to be able to change who I trust over time and reason about roots of trust
- I should be able to list who I trust to build my software
- Consensus is subjective
A rebuilder should be able to indicate what they built in a non-repudiatable way
- Source and dependencies –> binary
We need to be able to identify a rebuilder securely such as with a public key
- Trust and trust management requires identity
UX is essential especially for non-interested users
- Making RB actionable/useful to downstream consumers
- Making RB benefits easy to access for end users
- Trustless binary distribution
Doing a rebuild should be accessible
- Distros reproducing is silver, users reproducing is gold
There should not be properties that discourage institutional diversity in rebuilders.
Developer experience is important and developers shouldn’t be expected care for RB.
- The system should be invisible to them.
- Ideally, developers don’t need to update their workflows (much)
- Developers shouldn’t be surprised by RB results and the system behavior, aka. understandability
- As developer of a lib I want to make sure I can do a simple fix.
Nice to have
Diverse rebuilder support is desirable
- Comparing rebuilder results
- RB creates resilience by having free choice of build system
- Diversity is a means to achieve resilience
Ideally there is a usable means to report irreproducibility possibly implicitly
Ideally closed source / secrets in software should be supported
Optional
Ideally there is a way to verify a rebuilder did work
