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Git client vulnerability announced

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141–150 of 191 posts

Re: Git client vulnerability announced

#141

I think here is a good argument for not using case-insensitive filesystems - because every single filename comparison gets affected and it can lead to vulnerabilities like this (I wonder what others are out there...) Case-insensitive initially feels like a good idea to some, but I think it's a good example of "trying to do too much" and often in subtle ways that even the user might not fully understand - the definiti…

The issue here is not case-insensitive filesystems, they are a huge benefit to novice users. But that the type system does not distinguish between paths and strings. A path is distinctly different from a string, and should never be compared as one. The type system should always enforce this and never allow you to mistakingly do the comparison you propose, for exactly the reasons you state. Modern filesystem libraries (for type-safe languages) do this, the problem is (as is becoming more and more common lately) the abundance of old tools that were not designed with security in mind.

Re: Git client vulnerability announced

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just downloaded git from git-scm.org and I only got 2.0.1. :/

It's now available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/git-osx-installer/files/late...

Why SourceForge? Since they changed investors a few years ago, I thought SourceForge now added spameare to installers, such as the Ask toolbar for example?

Re: Git client vulnerability announced

#143
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a discussion of this a few weeks ago on the mailinglist of a scientific software project I use. The people were very clearly divided into the "Flash does it, so it's ok" and "omg no, think of the user privacy" camps, it was quite interesting.

I think I'm much more ok with background things upgrading in the background. For instance: I never open a new browser tab and think "hmmm, lets launch a Flash process", it's just there, ready to respond when needed. So it isn't shocking to find that it polls for updates and applies them. By contrast, git is a tool that I manually invoke on the command line, and when the process terminates it's done. Having that phone…

That's a good point actually. It fits with the principle of least confusion. (The software I mentioned is a command line tool/library.)

Re: Git client vulnerability announced

#144
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's now available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/git-osx-installer/files/late...

Why SourceForge? Since they changed investors a few years ago, I thought SourceForge now added spameare to installers, such as the Ask toolbar for example?

It's opt-in. The spamware doesn't get added automatically, you as a project admin need to enable this.

Re: Git client vulnerability announced

#145
post #95
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make sure you're not using Apple Git (/usr/bin/git); I renamed mine.

I tend to put /usr/local/bin ahead of /usr/bin on my $PATH, which nicely solves that problem.

It should do, but if an application wants to use /usr/bin/git for some reason they can still just do that!

Re: Git client vulnerability announced

#146
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can mount NTFS case sensitive, but you probably don't want case sensitivity if you interop with Windows and, if you don't, why on earth would you use NTFS?

Yeah. NTFS is case preserving, not case sensitive.

NTFS is case sensitive. The Win32 layer presents NTFS as case preserving, but the NT POSIX layer (since renamed to SFU), as well as Cygwin, use NTFS's case sensitivity.

Re: Git client vulnerability announced

#147
post #8

Homebrew just updated ( https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/pull/35105 ), so Homebrew users should be covered by brew update && brew upgrade git

Ironically, Homebrew uses git to update its package metadata, but presumably you already trust Homebrew to not deliver malicious software (I also don't know if "pull" is vulnerable, or just "clone" and "checkout". Also Homebrew is hosted on Github, which now scans/blocks malicious repos)

> I also don't know if "pull" is vulnerable, or just "clone" and "checkout

Yes it is

Now if you just do fetch and don't merge/rebase you're safe, still, this is a very rare occurence

Re: Git client vulnerability announced

#148

The download page at http://git-scm.com/download/mac still offers 2.0.1 even though the start page announces 2.2.1.

Same for me. But http://git-scm.com/ offers 2.2.1

It looks like 2.2.1 is the latest source code version, but the builds for Windows and Mac are slightly behind. The windows download is 1.9.5, but was built 13 hours ago and has the fix.

Re: Git client vulnerability announced

#150
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I'm much more ok with background things upgrading in the background. For instance: I never open a new browser tab and think "hmmm, lets launch a Flash process", it's just there, ready to respond when needed. So it isn't shocking to find that it polls for updates and applies them. By contrast, git is a tool that I manually invoke on the command line, and when the process terminates it's done. Having that phone…

That's a good point actually. It fits with the principle of least confusion. (The software I mentioned is a command line tool/library.)

A tool printing "This version has a critical vulnerability, upgrade immediately" wouldn't be confusing though, or cause any problems. Even if it wasn't connected to the network, it simply wouldn't print that message. Everything else would still work properly.

It seems like people are worried about privacy without thinking it through.

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