Is it easier? The benefit of bugdoors isn't ease, it's that they're plausibly deniable, if you get caught, so what? You might even be able to convince people not to talk about it for months, and you can try again in a new patch, there's zero penalty.
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Replying to @taviso @rene_mobile and
There might be non-security benefits of reproducible builds to *vendors*, but I don't see any benefit to users of being able to reproduce them. This is just because promising there's no backdoors make no sense when bugdoors are just so perfect?
1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes -
Replying to @taviso @rene_mobile and
Fwiw I see benefits in reproducible builds to answer the question "is the binary on my machine built from this source"?
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Replying to @halvarflake @taviso and
Without reproducible builds, source analysis offers zero benefit. With reproducible builds, it offers some benefit. For example, crypto bugdoors that allow mass-scale passive decryption are possible (Dual EC, Fortinet) but are also extremely rare.
2 replies 1 retweet 27 likes -
Replying to @matthew_d_green @halvarflake and
What benefit does it offer? There's no penalty for making a bugdoor, so if you catch the vendor's bugdoor, they have to make a new one?
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Replying to @taviso @matthew_d_green and
To be clear, source analysis is useful to catch non-malicious vendors who make a mistake. If you're trying to determine if a vendor *is* malicious, src analysis provides no benefit, because there is no penalty for hiding a bugdoor....so how do repro builds help?
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Replying to @taviso @halvarflake and
There are a lot of people involved in the build process. And a much smaller number of people involved in the development of specific portions of code. If you can isolate your security concerns to those areas (still aspirational) you can reduce your trusted dev base.
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Replying to @matthew_d_green @halvarflake and
The discussion is around publishing reproducible builds for the public though, right? This is a way of verifying your build process isn't compromised, but you don't need to publish them and hope the public checks it for that.
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Replying to @taviso @matthew_d_green and
You can simply hire a third party to do it for you, and then promise you checked for a compromised build. Your users have to trust you anyway, because they need to trust you're not inserting bugdoors.
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Replying to @taviso @halvarflake and
Reproducible builds offer a relatively cost effective way to replace your third party (who now has to verify ever point release and security patch), without adding new trusted parties. That alone seems like a win.
1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
In the case of open source code, you can argue it's a cheap way of verifying your build server isn't compromised (if you're willing to just hope the public will check for you). There are very clearly huge costs to proprietary code to doing this, and zero security benefits.
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