Security, bootstrapping, and transparency [LWN.net]

Security, bootstrapping, and transparency

Posted Jul 26, 2021 12:12 UTC (Mon) by civodul (guest, #58311)
Parent article: Tor gets financial support for Arti development

Another security consideration in the choice of a language is its bootstrapping story, to reduce chances of "Trusting Trust" attack as described by Ken Thompson.

Currently though, Rust requires a pre-built binary version of itself to build. This has been worked around in Guix via mrustc, a compiler for a subset of Rust implemented in C++ (GCC's Rust frontend may eventually provide another option to get there).

The road is still bumpy though, so let's hope Rust eventually has a goal to support an official bootstrapping method that would give distributors an incentive to build it from source.

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Security, bootstrapping, and transparency

Posted Jul 29, 2021 16:45 UTC (Thu) by peter-b (guest, #66996) [Link] (2 responses)

> Another security consideration in the choice of a language is its bootstrapping story, to reduce chances of "Trusting Trust" attack as described by Ken Thompson.

People seem to worry about bootstrapping Rust far more than they worry about bootstrapping C or C++. Are there any C++ compilers that can be compiled without a C++ compiler?

Security, bootstrapping, and transparency

Posted Jul 29, 2021 17:07 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

C and C++ have multiple independently developed compilers.

Rust has one and a half.

Security, bootstrapping, and transparency

Posted Aug 1, 2021 7:13 UTC (Sun) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link]

This is nearly ironic, because the person you're asking is involved in a large project which, among other things, tries to tackle bootstrapping in a very systematic manner.

Had you followed the Guix links given to you, you might have stumbled upon interesting things.

Here's specifically something about bootstrapping C in Guix's context:

https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/guix-reduces-bootstrap-see...

Actually, bootstrapping C has a long and rich history, with several minimalist C compilers being built to build more complete compilers on top.