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There's nothing guaranteeing that Deb contains the same thing as source Deb. At the end of the day you still need to trust the organization building your OS so

by izacus 6y ago

There's nothing guaranteeing that Deb contains the same thing as source Deb. At the end of the day you still need to trust the organization building your OS so they don't push a backdoor in your root installed package.

Avamander 6y ago
> There's nothing guaranteeing that Deb contains the same thing as source Deb. That's blatantly understating how many packages are reproducible.
- izacus 6y ago
  No it's not - reproducibility doesn't defend you against malicious repository at all. You still need to trust every single maintainer of your packages and the repository owner to not serve you backdoored package.
  - w4rh4wk5 6y ago
    Yes and no. Just having reproducibility does not automatically prevent bad things from happening. But it's certainly easier to defend against them. Multiple people can grab the sources from the developer, review and apply the patches, build the package and publish the resulting hash. With reproducible builds, all people end up with the same hash, which should also be the same for the pre-built package in the repository. In other words, instead of trusting one single person (the maintainer) you split the trust across multiple people. This is definitely an improvement thanks to reproducible builds.
zingplex 6y ago
Isn't this exactly why they're doing the reproducible build stuff?
sichtlinkair 6y ago
> At the end of the day you still need to trust the organization building your OS so they don't push a backdoor in your root installed package. I am curious what are good solutions to this problem? Compile your OS (and any other software) from source?
- content_sesh 6y ago
  Somewhere a Gentoo maintainer's ears are ringing, but they don't know why...
- ex_amazon_sde 5y ago
  A backdoor/bugdoor is much more likely to be in the source code. Compiling the code by yourself does not help. You have to rely on a distribution that has a many-eyes review policy and has security conscious users.
dbrgn 6y ago
This is what reproducible builds try to fix: https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds
goodpoint 5y ago
No, you can already download the source .debs, rebuild them and compare the results. And, there are large tech firms doing this already.

by izacus 6y ago

Avamander 6y ago

> There's nothing guaranteeing that Deb contains the same thing as source Deb. That's blatantly understating how many packages are reproducible.

izacus 6y ago
No it's not - reproducibility doesn't defend you against malicious repository at all. You still need to trust every single maintainer of your packages and the repository owner to not serve you backdoored package.
- w4rh4wk5 6y ago
  Yes and no. Just having reproducibility does not automatically prevent bad things from happening. But it's certainly easier to defend against them. Multiple people can grab the sources from the developer, review and apply the patches, build the package and publish the resulting hash. With reproducible builds, all people end up with the same hash, which should also be the same for the pre-built package in the repository. In other words, instead of trusting one single person (the maintainer) you split the trust across multiple people. This is definitely an improvement thanks to reproducible builds.

zingplex 6y ago

Isn't this exactly why they're doing the reproducible build stuff?

sichtlinkair 6y ago

> At the end of the day you still need to trust the organization building your OS so they don't push a backdoor in your root installed package. I am curious what are good solutions to this problem? Compile your OS (and any other software) from source?

content_sesh 6y ago
Somewhere a Gentoo maintainer's ears are ringing, but they don't know why...
ex_amazon_sde 5y ago
A backdoor/bugdoor is much more likely to be in the source code. Compiling the code by yourself does not help. You have to rely on a distribution that has a many-eyes review policy and has security conscious users.

dbrgn 6y ago

This is what reproducible builds try to fix: https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds

goodpoint 5y ago

No, you can already download the source .debs, rebuild them and compare the results. And, there are large tech firms doing this already.