I think r13y has said the minimal ISO was less than 10 packages away from 100% over 2 years now. The long tail has finally been overcome! Huge news.
Nixos-unstable’s ISO_minimal.x86_64-Linux is 100% reproducible
71–80 of 232 posts
Re: Nixos-unstable’s ISO_minimal.x86_64-Linux is 100% reproducible
#72This really deserves more love. Who remembers Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust"? The norm today is auto-updating, pre-built software. This places a ton of trust in the publisher. Even for open-source, well-vetted software, we all collectively cross our fingers and hope that whoever is building these binaries and running the servers that disseminate them, is honest and good at security. So far this has mo…
>self interest (companies do not want to attack their own users).
Anyone who has bought an Android phone in the past 5 years knows that's not true.
Re: Nixos-unstable’s ISO_minimal.x86_64-Linux is 100% reproducible
#73This really deserves more love. Who remembers Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust"? The norm today is auto-updating, pre-built software. This places a ton of trust in the publisher. Even for open-source, well-vetted software, we all collectively cross our fingers and hope that whoever is building these binaries and running the servers that disseminate them, is honest and good at security. So far this has mo…
"- Build from source. This will always be a deeply niche thing to do. It's slow, inconvenient, and inaccessible except to nerds." I prefer compiling from source to binary packages. For me it is neither slow, incovenient nor inaccessible. Only with larger, more complex programs does compiling from source become a PITA. The "solution" I take is to prefer smaller, less complex programs over larger, more complex ones. If…
"except to nerds" was conversationally phrased shorthand for "except to people with rarefied technical skills".
Re: Nixos-unstable’s ISO_minimal.x86_64-Linux is 100% reproducible
#74This really deserves more love. Who remembers Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust"? The norm today is auto-updating, pre-built software. This places a ton of trust in the publisher. Even for open-source, well-vetted software, we all collectively cross our fingers and hope that whoever is building these binaries and running the servers that disseminate them, is honest and good at security. So far this has mo…
"- Build from source. This will always be a deeply niche thing to do. It's slow, inconvenient, and inaccessible except to nerds." I prefer compiling from source to binary packages. For me it is neither slow, incovenient nor inaccessible. Only with larger, more complex programs does compiling from source become a PITA. The "solution" I take is to prefer smaller, less complex programs over larger, more complex ones. If…
[deleted]
Re: Nixos-unstable’s ISO_minimal.x86_64-Linux is 100% reproducible
#75This really deserves more love. Who remembers Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust"? The norm today is auto-updating, pre-built software. This places a ton of trust in the publisher. Even for open-source, well-vetted software, we all collectively cross our fingers and hope that whoever is building these binaries and running the servers that disseminate them, is honest and good at security. So far this has mo…
"- Build from source. This will always be a deeply niche thing to do. It's slow, inconvenient, and inaccessible except to nerds." I prefer compiling from source to binary packages. For me it is neither slow, incovenient nor inaccessible. Only with larger, more complex programs does compiling from source become a PITA. The "solution" I take is to prefer smaller, less complex programs over larger, more complex ones. If…
You don’t use a browser or an office suite? Because those are a pain in the ass to compile (in terms of time).
Re: Nixos-unstable’s ISO_minimal.x86_64-Linux is 100% reproducible
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Diverse double compilation should allow a demonstration that the toolchain is trustworthy.
Indeed, and with the work done by Guix and the Reproducible Builds project we do have a real-world example of diverse double compilation which is not just a toy example utilizing the GNU Mes C compiler. https://dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/#real-world
Projects like GNU Mes are part of the Bootstrappable Builds effort[0]. Another great achievement in that area is the live-bootstrap project, which has automated a build pipeline that goes from a minimal binary seed up to tinycc then gcc 4 and beyond.[1]
[0] https://www.bootstrappable.org/
[1] https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part...
Re: Nixos-unstable’s ISO_minimal.x86_64-Linux is 100% reproducible
#77I don't see a single comment doubting the value of reproducibility, so I'll be the resident skeptic :)
I think build reproducibility is a cargo cult. The website says reproducibility can reduce the risk of developers being threatened or bribed to backdoor their software, but that is just ridiculous. Developers have a perfect method for making their own software malicious: bugdoors. A bugdoor (bug + backdoor) is a deliberately introduced "vulnerability" that the vendor can "exploit" when they want backdoor access. If the bug is ever discovered you simply issue a patch and say it was a mistake, it's perfectly deniable. It's not unusual for major vendors to patch critical vulnerabilities every month, there is zero penalty for doing this.
The existence of bugdoors means you have to trust the vendor who provided the source code, there is no way around this.
You have to trust the developer, but in theory, reproducible builds could be used to convince yourself their build server hasn't been hacked. This isn't really necessary or useful, you can already produce a trustworthy binary by just building the source code yourself. You still have to trust the vendor to keep hackers off everything else though!
Okay, but building software is tedious, and for some reason you are particularly concerned about build servers being hacked. Perhaps you will nominate a dozen different organization that will all build the code, and make this a consensus system. If they all agree, then you can be sure enough the binaries were built with a trustworthy toolchain. A modest improvement in theory, but that introduces a whole bunch of new crazy problems.
You can't just pick one or two consensus servers, because then an attacker can stop you getting updates by compromising any one of them. You will have to do something like choose a lot of servers, and only require 51% to agree.
Now, imagine a contentious update like a adopting a cryptocurrency fork, or switching to systemd (haha). If the server operators rebel, they can effectively veto a change the vendor wants to make. Perhaps vendors will implement a killswitch that allows them to have the final say, or perhaps they operate all the consensus build servers themselves.
The problem is now you've either just replaced build servers with killswitches, or just replicated the same potentially-compromised buildserver.
I wrote a blog post about this a while ago, although I should update it at some point.
https://blog.cmpxchg8b.com/2020/07/you-dont-need-reproducibl...
Re: Nixos-unstable’s ISO_minimal.x86_64-Linux is 100% reproducible
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I totally believe it is possible, it is perhaps more of a cultural thing.
It's the pragmatic thing. I wouldn't use nixOS if I wasn't able to use it on a 16 core modern desktop. I don't think there's a performant and 100% FLOSS compatible computer that wouldn't make me want to gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon when building stuff for ARM.
And it’s not just hardware, there is a useful limit on purity of licenses. In many cases only proprietary programs can do the work at all, or orders of magnitudes better.
Re: Nixos-unstable’s ISO_minimal.x86_64-Linux is 100% reproducible
#79This really deserves more love. Who remembers Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust"? The norm today is auto-updating, pre-built software. This places a ton of trust in the publisher. Even for open-source, well-vetted software, we all collectively cross our fingers and hope that whoever is building these binaries and running the servers that disseminate them, is honest and good at security. So far this has mo…
"- Build from source. This will always be a deeply niche thing to do. It's slow, inconvenient, and inaccessible except to nerds." I prefer compiling from source to binary packages. For me it is neither slow, incovenient nor inaccessible. Only with larger, more complex programs does compiling from source become a PITA. The "solution" I take is to prefer smaller, less complex programs over larger, more complex ones. If…
Unfortunately, it's easy to break a lot of builds by things such as deciding not to install to /usr/local, or by building on a Mac. Pushing publishers to practices that aid reproducible builds would help both sides.
I'd love to try building NetBSD, btw, I must try that!
Re: Nixos-unstable’s ISO_minimal.x86_64-Linux is 100% reproducible
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, and with the work done by Guix and the Reproducible Builds project we do have a real-world example of diverse double compilation which is not just a toy example utilizing the GNU Mes C compiler. https://dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/#real-world
Projects like GNU Mes are part of the Bootstrappable Builds effort[0]. Another great achievement in that area is the live-bootstrap project, which has automated a build pipeline that goes from a minimal binary seed up to tinycc then gcc 4 and beyond.[1] [0] https://www.bootstrappable.org/ [1] https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part...
I feel the need to point out that the "Bootstrappable Builds" project is a working group from a Reproducible Builds project which where interested in the next step beyond reproducing binaries. Obviously this project has seen most effort from Guix :)
The GNU Mes C experiment mentioned above was also conducted during the 2019 Reproducible Builds summit in Marrakesh.