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Git client vulnerability announced

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111–120 of 191 posts

Re: Git client vulnerability announced

#111
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree Git can be complex, but... CVS? Really? I do not miss non-atomic commits at all .

The point is that for OpenBSD that security trumps anything else, including usability of developer tools.

Yes, I get that. It's a worthy goal, too. But I still think software must also be usable in addition to secure.

Re: Git client vulnerability announced

#112
post #74

Should programs periodically check for critical security fixes, and then refuse to run if the current version is affected? It seems like there are a lot of people who don't really pay attention to social media or other security alert channels, who won't have a clue about the extent of this vulnerability. I'm sure they'd update if they knew "if I clone a malicious repo, I'm toast," but there's no way to inform them ex…

I'm not sure how I feel about programs phoning home like that. I tolerate it with apps, but command line tools ought to be doing their stated function when run.

I think it's a distro's job to deal with it. The cli tool shouldn't phone home, but the distro should be able to be notified of a critical update and strongly warn you the next time you try to launch it.

Maybe even a push update you can subscribe to.

Re: Git client vulnerability announced

#113
post #100

Ouch! And I thought the OpenBSD people were paranoid for sticking with CVS. (because Git is too bloated and complex in their view, so they weren't able to review it thoroughly, which would have been the only way for them to trust it.) I always get a strange, uneasy feeiling when the tin foil hats turn out to be right. I wonder if they are right on GPG, too. For those who don't know this: The OpenBSD people refuse to…

Git devs made the incorrect assumption that saving .giT/cONFIg to disk, would actually save .giT/cONFIg to disk.

Ridiculously enough, this is not always the case (I weep for us).

Should they have known that Windows and MacOS sport case-insensitive filesystems? Definitely.

But, how does this have anything to do with bloat or complexity?

Re: Git client vulnerability announced

#114
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 definition of "case" changes with locale, for instance. In contrast, with filenames that are treated as dumb and simple, plain sequences of bytes that just cannot contain certain characters (and thus compared accordingly for equality, bit-by-bit), there is no need to even consider the concept of "case", and no ambiguity: It either matches exactly or doesn't match.

(I am aware of all the - quite frankly ridiculous - complexity of Unicode characters that are visually identical and "should be treated as such for the purposes of comparison", but I think that's another example of excess complexity leading to things like directory-traversal attacks.)

Re: Git client vulnerability announced

#115
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CVS has had multiple arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities, though.

Yes, but the point is that vulnerabilities in cvs are likely very few as of today, because the code is old and simple, and have been used a lot.

Like bash.

Re: Git client vulnerability announced

#116
Isn't it pretty nonchalant that git-scm.com doesn't have a huge red banner advising people to "pay attention and update, or face the pwn"?

Maybe alert banners aren't in the git-scm.com css template.

edit: Is it that I'm on Linux? I changed a few UAs but the download image still reads "Downloads for Linux".

Re: Git client vulnerability announced

#117
post #15
post #8

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

And don't copy&paste the above code into the terminal! (Potential vulnerability, though HN is probably safe.)

What is the potential vulnerability?

Re: Git client vulnerability announced

#118
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can at least in theory inspect the library code after cloning it but before compiling it. Insta-owning your machine just because you cloned it is considerably worse. This is especially true if you always run the library in a sandbox of some sort (e.g. you're building an Android app and your code always runs on an Android device or emulator).

With Android apps you still build locally, typically with Gradle, allowing arbitrary code execution on the host.

Oh yes, I suppose a bad build script could undo you. In the land of iOS there are sometimes "libraries" that are just distributed as source files that you add to your own project, so I suppose that at least would qualify.

Re: Git client vulnerability announced

#120
post #100

Ouch! And I thought the OpenBSD people were paranoid for sticking with CVS. (because Git is too bloated and complex in their view, so they weren't able to review it thoroughly, which would have been the only way for them to trust it.) I always get a strange, uneasy feeiling when the tin foil hats turn out to be right. I wonder if they are right on GPG, too. For those who don't know this: The OpenBSD people refuse to…

Git devs made the incorrect assumption that saving .giT/cONFIg to disk, would actually save .giT/cONFIg to disk. Ridiculously enough, this is not always the case (I weep for us). Should they have known that Windows and MacOS sport case-insensitive filesystems? Definitely. But, how does this have anything to do with bloat or complexity?

And the case-sensitivity stuff is somewhat low-hanging fruit, but...

   On Windows, certain path components that are different from ".git"
   are mapped to ".git", e.g. "git~1/config" is treated as if it were
   ".git/config".  HFS+ has a similar issue, where certain unicode
   codepoints are ignored, e.g. ".g\u200cit/config" is treated as if
   it were ".git/config"
So that's what ridiculous means. Huh.
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