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Expanding (Dis)Trust

How can we prove that our software has not been tampered during build time?

  • Binary - software that's in a format computers can work with
  • Compiler - builds software into binaries
  • Hashing - takes a data set and produces a fixed length string
    • 8a1aaf746ada2a80fab03a58c91575ffe82885ac "banana"
    • 9144b7b25e83a315de79e7a527f5631f9d4dacf2 "banan"

Anton Livaja

Co-Founder & Security Engineer at Distrust (https://distrust.co)

  • Firm specializing in high assurance security consulting and engineering.

  • Mission: to improve the security, privacy and freedom of as many people as possible through working on fundamental security problems and creating open source solutions.

  • Clients: electrical grid operators, healthcare providers, fin-tech companies and more.

Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust

[The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code...]

no-tamper-evidence

What's the Answer?

  • Integrity hashes are already widely used

    • How do we use them to verify the integrity of software during build time, not after?

  • Determinism / Reproducibility

    • Method of building software which ensures that the resulting binary for a piece of software is always bit-for-bit identical.

  • When something is bit-for-bit identical each time it is deterministic

  • Once something is deterministic, it can be reproduced

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How Deep Do We Have to Go?

  • Software Application

    • First Party Code
    • Third Party Code

  • Build and Runtime Environment

    • Operating System + Packages
    • Additional CLI / Tools

  • Compiler

Adequate Solution

  • Allows us to make the whole tree deterministic

  • Can be easily reproduced

  • Drop in replacement / easy to upgrade

Bootstrapping our Way Up

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Who Compiles the Compiler?

  • Mostly downloaded as a binary

  • Even if the compiler is built from source, usually another compiler is used to do so

  • This means there is no clear providence to how we went from nothing to having a usable compiler

Bootstrapping Compilers

  • Consists of "stages", and hundreds of steps of starting from a human auditable rudimentary compiler and building up all the way up to a modern compiler

  • Bootstrapping programming languages

We Have a Compiler, Now What?

  • Build all of the different dependencies we need:
    • linux kernel
    • bash
    • openssl
    • git
    • Yes... I mean everything in your build environment

Status Check-In

  • So far we have established we need the following for a solution:
    • Bootstrap a compiler in a deterministic manner
    • Use compiler to build all our dependencies
    • Last thing remaining: your application

[Stageˣ]

Open source Linux Distribution

Multi-Signed, Bootstrapped, Deterministic, and Minimal

Distribution Signatures Libc Bootstrapped Reproducible Rust deps
Stagex 2+ Human Musl Yes Yes 4
Debian 1 Human Glibc No Partial 231
Arch 1 Human Glibc No Partial 127
Fedora 1 Bot Glibc No No 167
Alpine None Musl No No 41

Full source bootstrapped from Stage 0

From a 256-byte compiler written in hex0, StageX bootstraps all the compiler tools necessary to build the distribution, 100% deterministically.

  • Stage 0: Getting a basic C compiler on x86
  • Stage 1: Building GCC for x86
  • Stage 2: Upgrading GCC for x86_64
  • Stage 3: Building up-to-date toolchains
  • Stage X: Shipping the software you know and love

A Rust Example

FROM stagex/pallet-rust@sha256:b5bb9d8014a0f9b1d61e21e796d78dccdf1352f23cd32812f4850b878ae4944c AS build
ADD . /src
WORKDIR /src
ARG TARGET x86_64-unknown-linux-musl
RUN cargo build --release --target ${TARGET}

FROM scratch
COPY --from=build /app/target/${TARGET}/release/hello /usr/bin/hello
CMD ["/usr/bin/hello"]

All packages in StageX are:

  • Built using hash-locked sources
  • Confirmed reproducible by multiple developers
  • Signed by multiple release maintainers

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Multi-Signed OCI Images

Pallets

StageX will soon offer prebuilt containers including all the packages necessary to run some of our most used software, such as:

  • rust
  • go
  • nodejs
  • nginx
  • redis
  • postgres

Key Takeaways

  • Bootstrapped compiler
  • Fully deterministic
  • Packages the software you're already using, but in a more secure manner.
  • Is a drop in replacement, and has native container support

What's Next?

  • Adding SBOM

  • Packaging more software

  • Fully automating software updates

  • Additional container runtimes like Podman and Kaniko

  • Additional chip architecture support such as ARM and RISC-V

How You Can Help

  • Provide feedback

  • Support with development efforts

  • Become a sponsor

Links

Email: anton@distrust.co / sales@distrust.co

Matrix Chat: #stagex:matrix.org

Docker Hub: https://hub.docker.com/u/stagex

Git Repo: https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex

Big thank you to sponsors who have supported the development of this project:

Turnkey, Distrust, Mysten Labs

Thank you to InCyber for hosting this fantastic event!