Re: Truth matters when writing software and selecting leaders

[Martin]

On 4/4/21 11:38 PM, Jacob Bachmeyer wrote:
> Martin wrote:
> > In a perfect world if everything is reproducible than all the 
> > compilations are deterministic. It means that for a given environment 
> > your source code will always produce the same binaries. Briefly DDC 
> > method is using mix of different environments in order to analyze the 
> > binary patterns of the same source code.
>
> The downside of this is that we are right back to a binary 
> monoculture, and an exploit that works on one machine would be 
> trivially guaranteed to work everywhere.  We really need some kind 
of 
> controlled randomization that allows provably equivalent executables 
> to be produced, but such that exploits relying on hardcoded offsets 
> will only work on a limited subset.
I don't understand what you mean by "binary monoculture" in this context 
can you elaborate more about it pls? Besides reproducibile-builds is not 
designed to solve all type of exploits. It's just hardening dev 
environment requirements to face the trusting trust issue 
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf 
. In general it doesn't make sens to make any "free software" 
development if you cannot trust your compiler. You cannot trust your 
source code if it produce different binaries in the same dev 
environment. This is the basic and once it's established than you can 
play with any "controlled randomization" ideas on top of it.