Reproducing distributed binaries

[Philip Cheney]

  I know that this topic has been discussed quite exhaustively with  
regard to other security applications, but here it goes again:

  What is necessary to determine that the binaries that are  
distributed are actually compiled from the source tarball (same  
checksum)?
[This is assuming, of course, that one checks out the source and the  
install scripts included with the binaries.]
  I assume you'd need to use the same compiler, compiler version, and  
compile options.  Anything else?

  I anticipate several responses suggesting that I just use the  
binary that I compiled in order to test the distributed version!  But  
there are advantages to using the prepackaged version (ie ease of  
installation and distribution across several systems).  It would be  
trivial to write a script to grab the tarball and the binary package,  
uncompress and compile the source (according to compile specs  
provided in the tarball?) then compare the two.  The script would  
also output the diffed source (and install scripts) (from the  
previous version) to let you examine the changes in the source code.

  If there were several people running a script like this with every  
release, it would be considerably easier to detect the presence of a  
trojaned binary package.

Any thoughts on the matter?

Cheers,
Phil
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