The backdoor wasn’t in the source code, only in the distributed binary. So reproducible builds would have flagged the tar as not coming from what was in Git
Reproducible builds generally work from the published source tarballs, as those tend to be easier to mirror and archive than a Git repository is. The GPG-signed source tarball includes all of the code to build the exploit.
The Git repository does not include the code to build the backdoor (though it does include the actual backdoor itself, the binary “test file”, it’s simply disused).
Verifying that the tarball and Git repository match would be neat, but is not a focus of any existing reproducible build project that I know of. It probably should be, but quite a number of projects have legitimate differences in their tarballs, often pre-compiling things like autotools-based configure scripts and man pages so that you can have a relaxed ./configure && make && make install build without having to hunt down all of the necessary generators.
Won’t help here; this backdoor is entirely reproducible. That’s one of the scary parts.
The backdoor wasn’t in the source code, only in the distributed binary. So reproducible builds would have flagged the tar as not coming from what was in Git
Reproducible builds generally work from the published source tarballs, as those tend to be easier to mirror and archive than a Git repository is. The GPG-signed source tarball includes all of the code to build the exploit.
The Git repository does not include the code to build the backdoor (though it does include the actual backdoor itself, the binary “test file”, it’s simply disused).
Verifying that the tarball and Git repository match would be neat, but is not a focus of any existing reproducible build project that I know of. It probably should be, but quite a number of projects have legitimate differences in their tarballs, often pre-compiling things like autotools-based configure scripts and man pages so that you can have a relaxed
./configure && make && make installbuild without having to hunt down all of the necessary generators.Time to change that tarball thing. Git repos come with built in checksums, that should be the way to go.
The back door is not in the source code though, so it’s not reproducible from source.
Part of the payload was in the tarball. There was still a malicious shim in the upstream repo