pacman-bintrans VS dysnomia

Compare pacman-bintrans vs dysnomia and see what are their differences.

pacman-bintrans

Experimental pacman integration for Reproducible Builds and Binary Transparency (with sigstore/rekor) (by kpcyrd)

dysnomia

Dysnomia: A tool for deploying mutable components (by svanderburg)
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
www.saashub.com
featured
pacman-bintrans dysnomia
8 2
83 80
- -
5.1 4.0
4 months ago about 1 year ago
Rust Shell
GNU General Public License v3.0 only MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

pacman-bintrans

Posts with mentions or reviews of pacman-bintrans. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-02-15.
  • Pacman-bintrans – Experimental binary transparency for pacman via sigstore/rekor
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 23 May 2022
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Jan 2022
  • ProtonMail Is Inherently Insecure, Your Emails Are Likely Compromised
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Feb 2022
    If you trust them with your keys, why not trust them with your plaintext? At which point, why bother with E2EE at all?

    The answer should be "because one day web browsers will be able to pin specific versions of specific web apps, with specific hashes, corresponding to specific releases tagged in their repo, which have been audited by a certain threshold of auditors that I trust".

    What that looks like in practice is probably some mixture of the following projects:

    https://github.com/kpcyrd/pacman-bintrans

    https://users.rust-lang.org/t/rust-code-reviews-web-site-for...

    https://paragonie.com/blog/2022/01/solving-open-source-suppl...

  • Solving Open Source Supply Chain Security for the PHP Ecosystem
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Jan 2022
    Generally speaking, Transparency Logs for securing software distribution has been a research topic since around 2015, I also wrote my master thesis on the subject.

    Sigstore is a Transparency Log intended for provenance and software artifacts which has support for a few different build artifacts. The container ecosystems also appears to be embracing it.

    Cool practical example is pacman-bintrans from kpcyrd that throws Arch Linux packages on sigstore and (optionally) checks each package for being reproducible before installation.

    https://github.com/kpcyrd/pacman-bintrans

    https://www.sigstore.dev/

    I think this is generally useful for a lot of ecosystems indeed, and it's cool to also see similar scoped projects pop up to address the these issues.

  • I Love Arch, but GNU Guix Is My New Distro
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Nov 2021
    Reproducible builds are an important part of efforts to secure the software supply chain. Ideally you want multiple independent parties vouching that a given package (whether a compiled binary, or a source tarball) corresponds to a globally immutably published revision in a source code repository.

    That gives you Binary Transparency, which is already being attempted in the Arch Linux package ecosystem[0], and it protects the user from compromised build environments and software updates that are targeted at a specific user or that occur without upstream's knowledge.

    Once updates can be tied securely to version control tags, it is possible to add something like Crev[1] to allow distributed auditing of source code changes. That still leaves open the questions of who to trust for audits, and how to fund that auditing work, but it greatly mitigates other classes of attack.

    [0] https://github.com/kpcyrd/pacman-bintrans

    [1] https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev

  • CII' FOSS best practices criteria
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Oct 2021
    It's good that having a reproducible build process is a requirement for the Gold rating, as is signed releases.

    Perhaps there needs to be a Platinum level which involves storing the hash of each release in a distributed append-only log, with multiple third parties vouching that they can build the binary from the published source.

    Obviously I'm thinking of something like sigstore[0] which the Arch Linux package ecosystem is being experimentally integrated with.[1] Then there's Crev for distributed code review.[2]

    [0] https://docs.sigstore.dev/

    [1] https://github.com/kpcyrd/pacman-bintrans

    [2] https://github.com/crev-dev/crev

  • Thousands of Debian packages updated from their upstream Git repository
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Aug 2021
    > Of course, since these packages are built automatically without human supervision it’s likely that some of them will have bugs in them that would otherwise have been caught by the maintainer.

    Human supervision isn't enough to protect the supply chain, and I can't think of a time that it's actually stopped an attack at the packaging stage, but having some extra "friction" in the process seems like it should be a benefit. Ideally an attacker would have to get past both the upstream author and the Debian maintainer, rather than these being two separate single points of failure.

    Fortunately the Debian project is improving the situation with regards to supply chain attacks by continuing to work on Reproducible Builds. I think the next step from there needs to be Binary Transparency, with the adoption of the sort of approach being trialled by Arch Linux:

    https://github.com/kpcyrd/pacman-bintrans

  • Binary transparency logs for pacman, the Arch Linux package manager
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Aug 2021

dysnomia

Posts with mentions or reviews of dysnomia. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-25.
  • What are NixOS's limitations?
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 25 Jun 2023
    NixOS doesn't have much, if anything, in the way of state management for services like databases. The Nix-iest way I know of managing those things is to write Dysnomia plugins for those things. But you'll have to figure out managing their internal state yourself to do that, e.g., with something like Liquibase or Flyway or something like that.
  • I Love Arch, but GNU Guix Is My New Distro
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Nov 2021
    Depends on how the state is stored. If it's in configuration, Nix generated it and it lives immutable in the Nix store, so Nix will just point out it to the old version on rollback.

    If it's something like the content of a SQL database, which lives outside the Nix store and which Nix did not generate, you need some other tool (like a filesystem snapshot, maybe) to perform the rollback. I think CoW filesystems sometimes have performance issues with DBs, though, so I'm not sure that's always the approach you'd take.

    The Nix ecosystem does have a fairly mature tool for managing stateful components that live outside the Nix store, though: https://github.com/svanderburg/dysnomia

    It's been around for a long time. Idk who all is using it

What are some alternatives?

When comparing pacman-bintrans and dysnomia you can also consider the following projects:

paru - Feature packed AUR helper

Intel-Linux-Processor-Microcode-Dat

arch-audit - A utility like pkg-audit for Arch Linux. Based on Arch Security Team data.

userscan - Scans files for Nix store references and registers them with the Nix garbage collector.

webext-signed-pages - A browser extension to verify the authenticity (PGP signature) of web pages

Intel-Linux-Processor-Microcode-Data-Files

gitian-builder - Build packages in a secure deterministic fashion inside a VM

nonguix

rebuilderd - Independent verification of binary packages - reproducible builds

nixpkgs - Nix Packages collection & NixOS

cargo-crev - A cryptographically verifiable code review system for the cargo (Rust) package manager.

SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
www.saashub.com
featured