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With respect to reproducible builds, they're pretty extensively used in engineering but have you considered that the reason they aren't more widely used outside

With respect to reproducible builds, they're pretty extensively used in engineering but have you considered that the reason they aren't more widely used outside of the industry is that most people simply don't care? I don't think that it's that the outputs are hard to use - it's that the vast majority of people installing and running software on their devices are perfectly fine with trusting the existing distribution infrastructure.

mike_hearn 5y ago
By "outputs" I mean "understandable and meaningful trust assertions" here, not actual binaries. As for don't care, sure, but I guess you can make that argument for almost anything security or privacy related. Do most people care if an app or website uses SSL? Nope. They probably can't even tell. Sometimes it's just up to the people building the infrastructure to plan ahead a bit, see what problems can arise and take countermeasures. I think it's much easier to make progress on audited builds than e.g. PGP style end-to-end encryption. Audited builds and remote attestations are the sort of thing that can be done behind the scenes, they don't inconvenience end users. People who care can double-check what the auditors are saying, and "people who care" might include journalists, politicians and other people with powerful megaphones who can affect change. Plus it doesn't require a big breakthrough in tech. It does require Facebook (and Apple etc) to accept that just asserting their products are encrypted isn't really achieving anything, and for some engineers to say "OK, let's find a few foreign companies to cross-sign with us". It might require some changes in the app stores. I see a post elsewhere claiming that Google is phasing out the model in which developers sign their own APKs, which is a pity and a retrograde step. But if the right people agree with these arguments, all those problems are solvable.

mike_hearn 5y ago

By "outputs" I mean "understandable and meaningful trust assertions" here, not actual binaries. As for don't care, sure, but I guess you can make that argument for almost anything security or privacy related. Do most people care if an app or website uses SSL? Nope. They probably can't even tell. Sometimes it's just up to the people building the infrastructure to plan ahead a bit, see what problems can arise and take countermeasures. I think it's much easier to make progress on audited builds than e.g. PGP style end-to-end encryption. Audited builds and remote attestations are the sort of thing that can be done behind the scenes, they don't inconvenience end users. People who care can double-check what the auditors are saying, and "people who care" might include journalists, politicians and other people with powerful megaphones who can affect change. Plus it doesn't require a big breakthrough in tech. It does require Facebook (and Apple etc) to accept that just asserting their products are encrypted isn't really achieving anything, and for some engineers to say "OK, let's find a few foreign companies to cross-sign with us". It might require some changes in the app stores. I see a post elsewhere claiming that Google is phasing out the model in which developers sign their own APKs, which is a pity and a retrograde step. But if the right people agree with these arguments, all those problems are solvable.