Briar is a secure messenger, the next step in the crypto messenger evolution if you want. It is Free Software (Open Source), so everybody has the possibility inspect and audit its source code without needing to trust third-parties to have done so in secret.
However, for security critical software, just being Free Software is not enough. It is very easy to install a backdoor before compiling the source code into a binary file. This backdoor would of course not be part of the published source code, but it would be part of the file that gets released to the public.
So the question becomes: How can I be sure that the public source code corresponds exactly to what gets installed on my phone? The answer to that question is: Reproducible Builds.
A reproducible build is a process of compiling the human-readable source code into the final binary in such a way that it can be repeated by different people on different computers and still produce identical results. This way you can be reasonably sure there’s nothing else to worry about than the source code itself. Of course, there can still be backdoors or other malicious features hidden in the code, but at least then these can be found and exposed. Briar already had one security audit and hopefully more will follow.
While working on reproducible builds for a long time, Briar released version 1.0.12 which is the first version that was finally built deterministically, so everybody should be able to reproduce the exact same binary. To make this as easy as possible, we wrote a tool called Briar Reproducer. It automates the building and verification process, but it introduces yet another layer of things you need to trust or audit. So you are of course free to reproduce the results independently. We tried to keep things as basic and simple as possible though.
When we tag a new release in our source code repository, our continuous integration system will automatically fetch this release, build it and compare it to the published reference APK binary. It would be great, if people independent from Briar would set up an automated verification infrastructure that publishes the results for each Briar release. The more (diverse) people do this, the easier it is to trust that Briar releases haven’t been compromised!
So far, we only reproduce Briar itself and not all the libraries that it uses. However, we at least pin the hashes of these libraries with gradle-witness. There’s one exception. Since it is rather essential and critical, we also provide a Tor Reproducer that you can you use to verify that the Tor binaries that are embedded in Briar correspond to the public source code as well.
Doing reproducible builds can be challenging and there are waiting problems at every corner. We hope that all future releases of Briar will continue to be reproducible. If you are interested in the challenges, we overcame so far, you are welcome to read through the tickets linked in this master ticket.
What about F-Droid?
Reproducible builds are the precondition for getting Briar into the official F-Droid repository with its official code signature. (Briar also has its own F-Droid repository for now.) Unfortunately, we can not get it into F-Droid just now, because we are still working around a reproducible builds bug and this workaround is not yet available on F-Droid’s buildserver (which still uses Debian old-stable). We hope that it will be upgraded soon, so Briar will be available to all F-Droid users without adding an extra repository.
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