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by naniwaduni 1831 days ago
In principle, diverse double-compiling merely increases the number of compilers the adversary needs to subvert. There are obvious practical concerns, of course, but frankly this raises the bar less than maintaining the backdoor across future versions of the same compiler did in the first place, since at least backdooring multiple contemporary compilers doesn't rely on guessing, well ahead of time, what change future people are going to make.

Critically, it shouldn't be taken as a demonstration that the toolchain is trustworthy unless you trust whoever's picking the compilers! This kind of ruins approaches based on having any particular outside organization certify certain compilers as "trusted".

1 comments

There is an uphill effort here to actually do this. While theoretically a very informed adversary might get it right first time, human adversaries are unlikely to and their resources are large, but far from infinite.

Your entire effort is potentially brought down by someone making a change in a way you didn't expect and someone goes "huh, that's funny..."

Quite frankly, I'm surprised that is hasn't come up multiple times in the course of getting to NixOS and etc. The attacks are easy to hide and hard to attribute.