Gitian

Read about the project goals at the “project home page”:https://gitian.org/ .

This package can do a deterministic build of a package inside a VM.

Deterministic build inside a VM

This performs a build inside a VM, with deterministic inputs and outputs. If the build script takes care of all sources of non-determinism (mostly caused by timestamps), the result will always be the same. This allows multiple independent verifiers to sign a binary with the assurance that it really came from the source they reviewed.

Prerequisites:

Linux:

sudo apt-get install git apache2 apt-cacher-ng python-vm-builder ruby

OSX with MacPorts:

sudo port install ruby coreutils
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/libexec/gnubin  # Needed for sha256sum

KVM

sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm

LXC (no need for hardware support):

sudo apt-get install debootstrap lxc

VirtualBox

Install virtualbox from virtualbox.org, and make sure VBoxManage is in your $PATH.

Create the base VM for use in further builds (requires sudo, please review the script):

KVM

bin/make-base-vm
bin/make-base-vm --arch i386

LXC

bin/make-base-vm --lxc
bin/make-base-vm --lxc --arch i386

Set the USE_LXC environment variable to use LXC instead of KVM:

export USE_LXC=1

VirtualBox

Command-line VBoxManage must be in your PATH

Setup:

make-base-vm cannot yet make VirtualBox virtual machines (patches welcome-- it should be possible to use VBoxManage, boot-from-network Linux images and PXE booting to do it). So you must either get or manually create VirtualBox machines that:

1. Are named “Gitian--” -- e.g. Gitian-lucid-i386 for a 32-bit, Ubuntu 10 machine.
2. Have a booted-up snapshot named “Gitian-Clean” . The build script resets the VM to that snapshot to get reproducible builds.
3. Has the VM’s NAT networking setup to forward port localhost:2223 on the host machine to port 22 of the VM; e.g.: VBoxManage modifyvm Gitian-lucid-i386 --natpf1 “guestssh,tcp,,2223,,22”

The final setup needed is to create an ssh key that will be used to login to the virtual machine:

ssh-keygen -t dsa -f var/id_dsa -N ""
ssh -p 2223 ubuntu@localhost 'mkdir -p .ssh && chmod 700 .ssh && cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys' < var/id_dsa.pub
ssh -p 2223 ubuntu@localhost
On VM: sudo bash
On VM: mkdir -p .ssh && chmod 700 .ssh && cat ~ubuntu/.ssh/authorized_keys >> .ssh/authorized_keys

Set the USE_VBOX environment variable to use LXC instead of KVM:

export USE_VBOX=1

Sanity-testing

If you have everything set-up properly, you should be able to:

PATH=$PATH:$(pwd)/libexec make-clean-vm --suite lucid --arch i386 start-target 32 lucid-i386 on-target ls -la stop-target

Building

Copy any additional build inputs into a directory named inputs.

Then execute the build using a YAML description file (can be run as non-root):

export USE_LXC=1 # LXC only
bin/gbuild <package>.yml

or if you need to specify a commit for one of the git remotes:

bin/gbuild --commit <dir>=<hash> <package>.yml

The resulting report will appear in result/<package>-res.yml

To sign the result, perform:

bin/gsign --signer <signer> --release <release-name> <package>.yml

Where is your signing PGP key ID and is the name for the current release. This will put the result and signature in the sigs//. The sigs/ directory can be managed through git to coordinate multiple signers.

After you’ve merged everybody’s signatures, verify them:

bin/gverify --release <release-name> <package>.yml

Poking around

• Log files are captured to the var directory
• You can run the utilities in libexec by running PATH="libexec:$PATH"
• To start the target VM run start-target 32 lucid-i386 or start-target 64 lucid-amd64
• To ssh into the target run on-target or on-target -u root
• On the target, the build directory contains the code as it is compiled and install contains intermediate libraries
• By convention, the script in <package>.yml starts with any environment setup you would need to manually compile things on the target

TODO:

• disable sudo in target, just in case of a hypervisor exploit
• tar and other archive timestamp setter

LXC tips

bin/gbuild runs lxc-start, which may require root. If you are in the admin group, you can add the following sudoers line to prevent asking for the password every time:

%admin ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/lxc-start

Recent distributions allow lxc-start to be run by non-priviledged users, so you might be able to rip-out the sudo calls in libexec/*.

If you have a runaway lxc-start command, just use kill -9 on it.

The machine configuration requires access to br0 and assumes that the host address is 10.0.2.2:

sudo brctl addbr br0
sudo ifconfig br0 10.0.2.2/24 up

Tests

Not very extensive, currently.

python -m unittest discover test