pacman-bintrans

No, not compile time... just verifying binary transparency: https://github.com/kpcyrd/pacman-bintrans

If you trust them with your keys, why not trust them with your plaintext? At which point, why bother with E2EE at all? The answer should be "because one day web browsers will be able to pin specific versions of specific web apps, with specific hashes, corresponding to specific releases tagged in their repo, which have been audited by a certain threshold of auditors that I trust". What that looks like in practice is probably some mixture of the following projects: https://github.com/kpcyrd/pacman-bintrans https://users.rust-lang.org/t/rust-code-reviews-web-site-for... https://paragonie.com/blog/2022/01/solving-open-source-suppl...

Generally speaking, Transparency Logs for securing software distribution has been a research topic since around 2015, I also wrote my master thesis on the subject. Sigstore is a Transparency Log intended for provenance and software artifacts which has support for a few different build artifacts. The container ecosystems also appears to be embracing it. Cool practical example is pacman-bintrans from kpcyrd that throws Arch Linux packages on sigstore and (optionally) checks each package for being reproducible before installation. https://github.com/kpcyrd/pacman-bintrans https://www.sigstore.dev/ I think this is generally useful for a lot of ecosystems indeed, and it's cool to also see similar scoped projects pop up to address the these issues.

Reproducible builds are an important part of efforts to secure the software supply chain. Ideally you want multiple independent parties vouching that a given package (whether a compiled binary, or a source tarball) corresponds to a globally immutably published revision in a source code repository. That gives you Binary Transparency, which is already being attempted in the Arch Linux package ecosystem[0], and it protects the user from compromised build environments and software updates that are targeted at a specific user or that occur without upstream's knowledge. Once updates can be tied securely to version control tags, it is possible to add something like Crev[1] to allow distributed auditing of source code changes. That still leaves open the questions of who to trust for audits, and how to fund that auditing work, but it greatly mit

It's good that having a reproducible build process is a requirement for the Gold rating, as is signed releases. Perhaps there needs to be a Platinum level which involves storing the hash of each release in a distributed append-only log, with multiple third parties vouching that they can build the binary from the published source. Obviously I'm thinking of something like sigstore[0] which the Arch Linux package ecosystem is being experimentally integrated with.[1] Then there's Crev for distributed code review.[2] [0] https://docs.sigstore.dev/ [1] https://github.com/kpcyrd/pacman-bintrans [2] https://github.com/crev-dev/crev

It would be nice if the release process also added the hash of any built binaries to a distributed append-only log. That's sort of the approach that sigstore and rekor were made for, to enable Binary Transparency, and they're already being used in the Arch Linux package ecosystem: https://github.com/kpcyrd/pacman-bintrans

You'll probably enjoy how it is being used to secure the Arch Linux package ecosystem then: https://github.com/kpcyrd/pacman-bintrans

> Signed code reviews and information about other Crev users are called proofs. This is really the other half of the puzzle which projects like sigstore[0] are trying to solve. Together they are creating a world where every binary installed on a machine has been reproducibly built from signed source code, with signed reviews, with the hash of each released version published in a public append-only log. A good example of the logging/transparency aspect is the experimental work being done with the Arch Linux package ecosystem.[1] Of course, none of this directly solves the problem of deciding which developers and reviewers to trust, but if mutually distrusting entities each performed their own audits and published the results (perhaps paid for out of countries' cyber-security budgets), it should be possible to give reputation-based guaran

The browser add-on that comes closest is Signed Page[0], and in theory it could provide TOFU level security by requiring the user to opt in to new versions. For unclear reasons, though, the devs seem to be against implementing that.[1] Any system for protecting against backdoors assumes that someone is auditing the code to check for user-specific code paths, so the only extra layer of security to add is some sort of Binary Transparency. A good example of that is Sigstore, which is being experimentally integrated with the Arch Linux package ecosystem.[2] [0] https://github.com/tasn/webext-signed-pages [1] https://github.com/tasn/webext-signed-pages/issues/13 [2] https://github.com/kpcyrd/pacman-bintrans

> This enables users to download an Android APK ... from a third-party which mirrors the Play Store apps (no credentials needed). Will it allow the app developers to sign releases, and will it check the signature when an APK is downloaded? Ideally these third-party mirrors would also support binary transparency, using a system like this: https://github.com/kpcyrd/pacman-bintrans

One way to mitigate that is through Binary Transparency, which would allow people to detect if a release is made for which there is no source code available (assuming the project already has reproducible builds). There is already a project attempting this for Arch Linux packages[0]. Of course it's still possible that an update could be sent to everyone which contains some code that only runs when a certain username is entered, so users would need to avoid updating the app until an audit by a trusted third party had approved it. [0] https://github.com/kpcyrd/pacman-bintrans

> Of course, since these packages are built automatically without human supervision it’s likely that some of them will have bugs in them that would otherwise have been caught by the maintainer. Human supervision isn't enough to protect the supply chain, and I can't think of a time that it's actually stopped an attack at the packaging stage, but having some extra "friction" in the process seems like it should be a benefit. Ideally an attacker would have to get past both the upstream author and the Debian maintainer, rather than these being two separate single points of failure. Fortunately the Debian project is improving the situation with regards to supply chain attacks by continuing to work on Reproducible Builds. I think the next step from there needs to be Binary Transparency, with the adoption of the sort of approach being trialled