// Personal website of Chris Smith

Reproducible builds are builds which you are able to reproduce byte-for-byte, given the same source input. Your initial reaction to that statement might be “Aren’t nearly all builds ‘reproducible builds’, then? If I give my compiler a source file it will always give me the same binary, won’t it?” It sounds simple, like it’s something that should just be fundamentally true unless we go out of our way to break it, but in reality it’s actually quite a challenge. A group of Debian developers have been working on reproducible packages for the best part of a decade and while they’ve made fantastic progress, Debian still isn’t reproducible. Before we talk about why it’s a hard problem, let’s take a minute to ponder why it’s worth that much effort.

On supply chain attacks

Suppose you want to run some open-source software. One of the many benefits of open-source software is that anyone can look at the source and, in theory, spot bugs or malicious code. Some projects even have sponsored audits or penetration tests to affirm that the software is safe. But how do you actually deploy that software? You’re probably not building from source - more likely you’re using a package manager to install a pre-built version, or downloading a binary archive, or running a docker image. How do you know whoever prepared those binary artifacts did so from an un-doctored copy of the source? How do you know a middle-man hasn’t decided to add malware to the binaries to make money?

Even worse: if the software you’re trying to use includes any dependencies, you have the same issue of trust with them. Maybe your supplier isn’t compromising the software, but that doesn’t mean their supplier isn’t. The beauty-cum-horror of a supply chain attack is that it can target the weakest link anywhere along the supply chain. Even if there aren’t any binary files involved, dependencies can still be attacked: what if npmjs.com or proxy.golang.org or github.com return a different version of a dependency-of-a-dependency when the request comes from your IP address? It doesn’t even need to be a modified dependency, it could be a perfectly un-tampered, properly signed copy of the source, just from an older version with a known vulnerability.

Enter stage left: reproducible builds, here to save the day! If the build process is reproducible then you - or anyone else on the internet - can perform the same build on the same source and validate the output has the same checksum or hash. If Debian publish a binary package and an independent re-builder comes up with the exact same build artifact, there’s a reasonably good chance that the build is good. An attacker would have to compromise both the build machine and the re-build machine to do anything nefarious. The more re-builders there are, the less feasible a supply chain attack is.

So why isn’t software just reproducible?

Compilers

As a bit of an experiment, I asked some friends to run the following for me and report the answer:

echo -e "#include <stdio.h>\nint main() { printf(\"Hello\"); return 0; }" | \
  gcc -x c -o hello.out - && \
  sha256sum hello.out

This compiles a super-simple hello world program and then prints the SHA-256 hash of the resulting binary. Here are the results:

As you can see, there are barely any duplicates. Even the same version of GCC on the same OS sometimes produces different results. And this is the most basic program I could write! Differences arise from the compiler version, the build flags, the libraries installed, and a whole host of other factors. If you compile a Go application instead of a C one, then by default the compiler will include debug information in the binary. This includes the full path to the source file on disk, so building a project in /home/chris/ will produce a different binary to building the same source in /tmp. Future versions of Go are also going to stamp in other meta-data such as VCS info, so building inside and outside a Git repository will produce different binaries.

Archives

Compilers are only half the problem. Build processes are usually multistep, involving compiling, moving, compressing, and so on. Consider creating an archive of a file:

repeat 4 touch hello && tar zcf hello.tgz hello && sha256sum hello.tgz && sleep 0.5
f3d5c56f6b8089de95d62d060e6ffcbbad26875807ae7bc253f07cd097ea61be  hello.tgz
ab67f2e865b5afa87d9b2434d92b0c271b3cf730fa85988f84852551749ba6ed  hello.tgz
ab67f2e865b5afa87d9b2434d92b0c271b3cf730fa85988f84852551749ba6ed  hello.tgz
738678c9650b10fd83636997dd1aba4016bbf0ec5ebf3dfd4ef75d770b56e23b  hello.tgz

Any file added to a tar takes with it a timestamp, so the build is only reproducible if it happens at the exact same time! We can make this reproducible by forcing tar (and the same goes for zip and most other archive formats) to set a certain timestamp on the files:

repeat 4 touch hello && tar --mtime 2022-02-18T01:00 -zcf hello.tgz hello && sha256sum hello.tgz && sleep 0.5 
081060a900beff2a6aad9957a8cbb8792f8db7904f86b318dbf26b682a2d3f0a  hello.tgz
081060a900beff2a6aad9957a8cbb8792f8db7904f86b318dbf26b682a2d3f0a  hello.tgz
081060a900beff2a6aad9957a8cbb8792f8db7904f86b318dbf26b682a2d3f0a  hello.tgz
081060a900beff2a6aad9957a8cbb8792f8db7904f86b318dbf26b682a2d3f0a  hello.tgz

In a real build there are basically two approaches here: you can set it to a pre-defined value (like the unix epoch), or you can set it to match the modification time of the source files. The former is easiest, but the latter is more cosmetically and semantically appealing.

Iteration order

So we’ve pinned our build environment, we’re manipulating timestamps when adding files to archives, now what? Imagine part of the build process involves looping through all the files in a directory and doing something. What order do these files get iterated in? Well, that very much depends on the filesystem and perhaps when the files themselves were created. To ensure this is reproducible we need to explicitly sort any such operation so that it’s always consistent. This iteration could be happening in a tool that’s called by another tool that’s called by a build script, so the fix isn’t necessarily straight-forward.

Interestingly, if you iterate over a map in Go, the iteration is deliberately non-deterministic. That’s an attempt to defeat Hyrum’s Law and prevent developers from relying on whatever the current behaviour happens to be. This actually makes it easier to make things reproducible as the problem is loud and in-your-face, rather than subtle and hard to spot.

Other sources

There’s an awful lot of other places that non-determinism can come from. If the app pulls in dependencies, their versions have to be pinned, otherwise your build changes depending on the latest release of that dependency. If the build process pulls any information from a website, it’s liable to change. Hopefully the website is under your control so that you can version the resource and pin that version. Obviously, anything to do with dates or the current user will probably cause problems. Timezones and locales can cause subtle differences.

What about Docker?

Docker comes with some good and some bad points for reproducibility. The biggest advantage is that it inherently completely describes the build environment; it should work exactly the same from one system to another, even across different OS families. The biggest draw back is it sprays timestamps around like no-one’s business. Each layer in a container image is a .tar.gz file, meaning each file within it is timestamped as discussed above. Making an image involves a lot of copying of files around, so these timestamps invariably end up causing reproducibility issues.

Even worse than timestamps in the filesystem, the image format also contains some meta-data that includes the timestamp at which each layer was built. That means even if you go out of your way to set the timestamp of every single file in your image, the image itself will be different every time you rebuild it. There is no way to deal with this in Docker, which is a very sad state of affairs. Fortunately, Buildah provides a --timestamp flag for its build commands; this not only sets the layer timestamp but also the creation timestamp of any file within the layer.

The other major issue that affects Docker images is the pinning of packages pulled in by package managers. An awful lot of images are based on Alpine or Debian derivatives, and use apk or apt to install dependencies. These need to have a version specified as otherwise the package manager will just pull in the latest at the time of the build. But this isn’t quite enough: you also need to pin the version of any packages that they depend on, recursively. This means flattening the entire package hierarchy and installing all the packages explicitly and with pinned versions.

One more wrinkle in the package management space is that Alpine don’t keep old packages in their main repositories. If you have a Docker image with pinned alpine packages in, it will stop building if the package is updated. This isn’t necessarily fatal to making a reproducible build – as long as it’s reproducible for its useful lifetime, I don’t really see an issue.

Honestly, though, the biggest issue with making Docker images reproducible is getting people to care. Dockerfiles are a relatively new way of packaging software, and there’s no centralised organisation like you find with Linux distributions. There are enough challenges that most casual packagers aren’t going to bother, and no real incentive for them to. That won’t stop me trying, though!