Seth Schoen

This year a robotic certificate authority will start issuing publicly-trusted certificates, at no charge, by the millions. Called Let's Encrypt, this CA is an initiative of several organizations. Our free software and protocol will let sysadmins run a single command to turn on HTTPS on their servers in about a minute, helping eliminate obstacles to activating encryption for every Web server. I'll describe how it all works and give a demo. We need lots of testing and integration help!

As we've called for widespread use of HTTPS, the cost and complexity of the certificate system has been an obstacle.

In 2015, a certificate authority, trusted by mainstream web browsers, will issue certificates for web servers automatically at no charge in under a minute. This CA will automatically perform Domain Validation (DV) to verify applicants' control over domain names. The associated software can optionally reconfigure their web servers and deploy the new certificates immediately. We'll take a look at how the Let's Encrypt CA works, our ACME protocol for requesting and issuing certs, and the client software that can automate the process. And we'll demonstrate what the experience of getting a cert from the new CA may look like for webmasters (don't look away, or you might miss it!). We'll also talk about who's behind Let's Encrypt and some of the measures we're considering for preventing misissuance of certs. Of course, you're invited to test and help perfect the process.

Software build reproducibility is the ability to use independent build machines to compile bit-identical binaries from program source code. In this talk, we will discuss the motivation for and the technical details behind software build reproducibility. We will describe the technical mechanisms used by the Tor Project to produce reproducible builds of the Tor Browser, and also introduce the early efforts of both F-Droid and Debian to achieve these same build integrity properties on a more wide-scale basis.

For the past several years, we've been seeing a steady increase in the weaponization, stockpiling, and the use of software exploits by many parties. In particular, there are an increasing number of vectors to "bridge the air gap" and exploit even disconnected machines. Software build systems make a worrisome target for these types of exploits, as they provide a stepping stone to compromise very large numbers of machines. To underscore this point, we will demonstrate a simple Linux rootkit that is capable of infecting the compilation process while otherwise leaving no traces on the machine. We will discuss a powerful solution to this problem: Build Reproducibility. We will focus on the build system used by The Tor Project to build Tor Browser - our Firefox-based browser. We will also touch upon current work by Debian, as well as by F-Droid and the Guardian Project for Android.

Other people: Mike Perry Hans Steiner

Today we often use binaries that someone claims were built from particular source code, but we usually have no way to check that the source and binaries we've been actually given correspond to one another. We rely on someone's say-so, and they might be wrong! Software developers and the infrastructure used to create and distribute software are significant targets of attack. We need ways to give everybody meaningful assurances about the provenance and integrity of the software they use.