Re: The git protocol and DoS

[Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz>]

Dear diary, on Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 10:00:05PM CEST, I got a letter
where "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com> told me that...
> One way to do this would be to start the transaction by having the 
> server transmit a cookie to the client, and to require the client to 
> send a SHA1 of the (cookie + request) together with the request.  This 
> would be done with a fairly short timeout.

  If (well, it sounds like a good idea, so rather "when") you do this,
it would be a good idea to do in a way that makes it easy to later add
support for some kind of authentication (really, not everyone wants to
give away ssh accounts). Let's say it works like:

[client]	git-upload-pack <path>
[server]	challenge somethingnonsensical
[client]	challenge-response <username>:sha1(somethingnonsensical<password>)
[server]	All right, the pack goes like this...

  Suddenly you have support for hopefully secure authentication, and at
the same time you have the cookie implemented in backwards-compatible
fashion (in the sense that new client will be able to talk to old
server) - just assume the username and password empty. This might be
even hardcoded for now, just leave a room for its addition (in an
elegant and compatible way) in the protocol, please.

  Thanks,

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/
VI has two modes: the one in which it beeps and the one in which
it doesn't.