It comes down to trusting two key things. Trusting your initial distribution download (which contains the package signing keys), and trusting the toolchain (in

It comes down to trusting two key things. Trusting your initial distribution download (which contains the package signing keys), and trusting the toolchain (in a Reflections on Trusting Trust way). But the deeper you go, the harder it is for malicious code to reside there. In theory it's possible, but in practice I'd like someone to show me some code somebody could have written into the toolchain a decade ago, without hindsight, which could still exist today. Whichever way, it's clearly far tougher for a malicious actor to compromise a system by injecting something into a distribution ecosystem than it is to inject a signed-by-unknown-reputation binary-only package into the Maven ecosystem.