Not sure how people do this in practice. But in principle it seems rather straight forward.
A compiler is just a program that takes some input and create some output. Both the compiler and the input can have a cryptographically secure hash. Putting both in a sealed box, like a docker image, with its own hash, gives you a program that takes no input and produces some output.
If the box changes, run it in a trusted machine and save the output together with a signed declaration of which box version produced it
Docker makes this drastically easier (need the exact same versions of all libraries and the compiler), but there are still compile time things that are unique per-compile. Debian has been working hard to get hashes of binaries to be useful but the work is far from trivial.
I see this an inherited technical debt though not a flaw in principle. It would be nice if we could solve this at the foundational level instead of forcing every dev organization to struggle with it on their own.
Edit: I think we’re getting there though, with all the efforts going on with containers, webassembly blockchains, ipfs and so forth it’s getting closer
Comments
Not sure how people do this in practice. But in principle it seems rather straight forward.
A compiler is just a program that takes some input and create some output. Both the compiler and the input can have a cryptographically secure hash. Putting both in a sealed box, like a docker image, with its own hash, gives you a program that takes no input and produces some output.
If the box changes, run it in a trusted machine and save the output together with a signed declaration of which box version produced it
Docker makes this drastically easier (need the exact same versions of all libraries and the compiler), but there are still compile time things that are unique per-compile. Debian has been working hard to get hashes of binaries to be useful but the work is far from trivial.
(See also: trusting trust)
I see this an inherited technical debt though not a flaw in principle. It would be nice if we could solve this at the foundational level instead of forcing every dev organization to struggle with it on their own.
Edit: I think we’re getting there though, with all the efforts going on with containers, webassembly blockchains, ipfs and so forth it’s getting closer