[Nix-dev] Sidestepping the community builds trust issue?

Wout Mertens wout.mertens at gmail.com
Mon Jan 4 06:23:03 CET 2016


It is case specific and involves fingerprinting each built file. For
example, with prelinking you rewrite the elf headers, and to verify
equivalence you simply set the linker instructions to 0 while calculating
the file checksum.

On Mon, Jan 4, 2016, 1:01 AM Tim Barbour <trb at categorical.net> wrote:

> On Sat, 26 Dec 2015 09:07:38 +0000,
> Wout Mertens wrote:
> > If web-of-trust is the best solution, and the only blocker is build
> reproducability, how about trying to classify
> > build differences?
> >
> > Each of the differences will have a reason, and either we can fix the
> build to be deterministic (e.g. timestamps,
> > build paths), or we can classify a class of changes as equivalent (e.g.
> optimalizations resulting in equivalent
> > code, prelinking).
> > [...]
>
> Your suggestion sounds a bit like homotopy, which type theorists are now
> using
> to resolve their long-standing difficulties with intensional vs extensional
> equality; perhaps there is a connection between these difficulties and the
> fact that Nixos is not yet using the intensional Nix store model.
>
> How would one verify that the builds are equivalent, and that the
> difference
> is not due to a malicious modification ?
>
> Tim
>
-- 

Wout.
(typed on mobile, excuse terseness)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.science.uu.nl/pipermail/nix-dev/attachments/20160104/2687b9f3/attachment.html 


More information about the nix-dev mailing list