VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Julien Malka
dblp:367/7119
· DBLP profile ↗
2ranked-venue papers
2as first author
2since 2021 · last 2026
0009-0008-9845-6300ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 2 · 2 first-author · 2 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 2 · 2 first-author · 2 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | LILA: Decentralized Build Reproducibility Monitoring for the Functional Package Management ModelabstractEnsuring the integrity of software build artifacts is an increasingly important concern for modern software engineering, driven by increasingly sophisticated attacks on build systems, distribution channels, and development infrastructures. Reproducible builds—where binaries built independently from the same source code can be verified to be bit-for-bit identical to the distributed artifacts—provide a principled foundation for transparency and trust in software distribution. Julien Malka, Arnout Engelen |
MSR | 1 |
| 2025 | Does Functional Package Management Enable Reproducible Builds at Scale? YesabstractReproducible Builds (R-B) guarantee that rebuilding a software package from source leads to bitwise identical artifacts. R-B is a promising approach to increase the integrity of the software supply chain, when installing open source software built by third parties. Unfortunately, despite success stories like high build reproducibility levels in Debian packages, uncertainty remains among field experts on the scalability of R-B to very large package repositories. In this work, we perform the first large-scale study of bitwise reproducibility, in the context of the Nix functional package manager, rebuilding 709816 packages from historical snapshots of the nixpkgs repository, the largest cross-ecosystem open source software distribution, sampled in the period 2017-2023. We obtain very high bitwise reproducibility rates, between 69 and $91 \%$ with an upward trend, and even higher rebuildability rates, over $99 \%$. We investigate unreproducibility causes, showing that about $15 \%$ of failures are due to embedded build dates. We release a novel dataset with all build statuses, logs, as well as full “diffoscopes”: recursive diffs of where unreproducible build artifacts differ. Julien Malka, Stefano Zacchiroli, Théo Zimmermann |
MSR | 1 |