Re:Canonical, Ubuntu, and Why I Seem so Upset About Them All...
by mjg59 on Friday February 19, 2016 @02:03AM
(#11132078)
And this would still only buy me something if Canonical are backdooring their packages, which I don't think they are. It's a huge amount of extra effort for what is (as far as I'm concerned) zero benefit.
Re:Canonical, Ubuntu, and Why I Seem so Upset About Them All...
by ryao on Friday February 19, 2016 @02:18AM
(#11132116)
That assumes that anyone interested in putting backdoors into Canonical's packages never gets a job making their packages. If you are really concerned having trustworthy systems, you need to build from source and if you doing that anyway, you might as well just use the binaries built from source.
You do not need a verifiable path to bootstrapping a toolchain to reduce surface area of attack to just the toolchain.
That being said, you could try building Clang with GCC and then GCC with Clang (or vice versa) to break any exploits designed to persist in either one indefinitely unless you are the victim of a really special hypothetical attack that targets both simultaneously, although I imagine you could interleave multiple GCC and Clang versions to make such an attack even harder to pull off or even add more compilers to the mix like EKOPath. That should reduce the attack surface area to binutils.