Distributions and Operating Systems: Trusting-Trust Attack, FreeBSD, Zenwalk, and Fedora

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 06, 2026

• arXiv ☛ [2607.24888] Trusting-Trust Attack against an Entire Linux Distribution through Binary Manipulation

  Ken Thompson's trusting-trust attack, in which a compromised compiler backdoors the programs it builds and reproduces the backdoor in subsequent rebuilds of itself, is widely regarded as a threat specific to compilers. We show that it is not. We construct a complete trusting-trust attack around GNU strip, an ordinary build utility that neither inspects nor generates source code, using only manipulations of finished ELF files. In the bootstrap of the NixOS Linux distribution, a single tampered strip in the binary seed implants a payload that propagates from one generation of strip to the next and survives into the final standard environment after the seed leaves the dependency closure. On a real nixpkgs revision, the attack builds a complete graphical installer without failures and backdoors almost every one of its binaries, enabling arbitrary malicious behavior of the subverted packages.

• BSD

  • Vermaden ☛ AMD Based FreeBSD Desktop Reloaded

    My previous AMD Based FreeBSD Desktop is still up and running – it will now be my kids computer … so I needed a new one … but not a bigger one 🙂 I spent way too much time finding new Mini-ITX case for the next one … and after all possibilities … I got Silverstone case again :] … because nothing else was this small and with all needed features. Also … I was thinking WHAT exactly should I buy – especially in the times with AI prices. For one of my older projects that failed (I hope to also publish about that some day) I had AMD Ryzen 4750GE CPU with 35W TDP but still 8C/16T CPU on AMD4 socket … so instead of killing all price/performance efficiency with DDR5 and AM5 setup … I went to decent AM4 option.

• Slackware Family

  • Distro Watch ☛ Distribution Release: Zenwalk GNU Linux Current-260905

    Zenwalk GNU Linux is a Slackware-based desktop distribution. The project's latest snapshot integrates Flatpak support and includes version 7.1.7 of the Linux kernel.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Kevin Fenzi: misc fedora bits: first week of sep 2026

    This week seemed to have a lot of small irq's all around. That said, I did make some progress on a few things: [...]