Tools for ensuring reproducible builds for open-source software

Abstract

The Reproducible Builds project is a collective effort of multiple open-source software projects, aiming to provide a verifiable path from human readable source code to the binary code used by computers. To achieve this goal, several tools were created, allowing for identifying common sources of unreproducibility in build process. In this work, an overview of the Reproducible Builds project and the tools designed is made. One of the tools, named diffoscope, is discussed in details; several improvements to this tool are made as part of this work.