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More detail on goals and bootstrapping

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Lance Vick 2024-01-24 05:35:49 -08:00
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# Packages
Minimalism and security first repository of reproducible and signed OCI images
of common open source software packages built from source.
Minimalism and security first repository of reproducible and multi-signed OCI
images of common open source software packages full-source bootsrapped from
Stage 0 all the way up.
These can be used as a secure supply chain for anything from obtaining local
tools, to bootstrapping a Linux distribution.
We built to support very high risk threat models where trusting any single
system or maintainer in our software supply chain cannot be tolerated. That
said, we should also function as a drop-in replacement for musl-based linux
distributions for virtually any threat model.
Our aim is to provide a reasonably secure set of toolchains for every major
programming language to be the basis of your containers, build systems,
firmware, secure enclaves, or hosting infrastructure.
## Background
@ -13,7 +20,7 @@ and the greatest of them may be that any system that is complex to review and
assigns trust of significant components to single human points of failure, is
doomed to have failure.
Most linux distributions rely on complex package management systems for which
Most Linux distributions rely on complex package management systems for which
only a single implementation exists. They assign package signing privileges to
individual maintainers at best. Modern popular distros often fail to even do
this, having a central machine somewhere blindly signing all unsigned
@ -52,20 +59,42 @@ the future.
* Like NixOS
* Maintainers sign all package additions/changes
* Like Gentoo, Debian, Fedora, Guix
* Reviewers locally build and counter-sign all new binary packages
* Reviewers/Reproducers locally build and counter-sign all new binary packages
* No one does this, as far as we can tell.
### Reproducibility
* Trust no single external source of binaries
* Bootstrap from two different third party signed distros
* Never use external binaries
* Bootstrap from 0, always, even if it means going back in time
* Go, rust require extensive work to bootstrap all the way back to gcc
* Guix is the only distro that does this for rust to our knowledge
* Full-Source Bootstrap from x86_64 assembly
* Take maximum advantage of the hard won wins by the Guix team
* Bootstrap from guile driver reproduced on multiple signed distros
The only way to produce trustworthy packages is to make sure no single system
or human is every trusted in the process of compiling them. Everything we
release must be built deterministically. Further to avoid trusting any specific
distro or platform, we must be able to reproduce even from wildly different
toolchains, architectures, kernels, etc.
Using OCI container images as our base packaging system helps a lot here by
making it easy to throw away non-deterministic build stages and control many
aspects of the build environment. Also, as a well documented spec, it allows
our packages to (ideally) be built with totally different OCI toolchains such
as Docker, Podman, Kaniko, or Buildah.
This is only part of the story though, because being able to build
deterministically means the compilers that compiler our code themselves must
be bootstapped all the way from source code in a deterministic way.
* Final distributable packages are always OCI container images
* OCI allows reproduction by totally different toolchains
E.g: Docker, Podman, Kaniko, or Buildah.
* OCI allows unlimited signatures on builds as part of the spec
* E.g: each party that chooses to reproduce adds their own signature
* We always "Full Source Bootstrap" everything from 0
* [Stage0](src/bootstrap/stage0/Dockerfile): 387 bytes of x86 assembly built by 3 distros with the same hash
* Also the same hash many others get from wildly different toolchains
* Relevant: [Guix: Building From Source All The Way Down](https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-building-from-source-all-the-way-down/)
* [Stage1](src/bootstrap/stage1/Dockerfile): A full x86 toolchain built from stage0 via [live-bootstrap](https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/parts.rst)
* [Stage2](src/bootstrap/stage2/Dockerfile): Cross toolchain bridging us to modern 64 bit architectures
* [Stage3](src/bootstrap/stage3/Dockerfile): Native toolchain in native 64 bit architecture
* [Stage(x)](.): Later stages build the distributed packages in this repo
For further reading see the [Bootstrappable Builds](https://bootstrappable.org/) Project.
### Minimalism