nixos

Trusting-Trust Attack against an Entire Linux Distribution through Binary Manipulationarxiv.org

The authors show that the classic trusting‑trust attack is not limited to compilers: by tampering with GNU strip they can inject a payload that propagates through NixOS's bootstrap and ends up in almost every binary of the final system. The attack succeeds on a real nixpkgs revision, building a full graphical installer while backdooring the majority of its binaries.