Re: Question about scm security holes

[Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 3:09 PM, walt <w41ter@gmail.com> wrote:
> I can't tell from the article if Perforce is any worse than any other scm
> for security holes, in fact it seems to imply that others haven't been tested in
> the same way.
>
> Just curious if anyone here has any thoughts about how the article may or
> may not have any relevance for git (git being the scm I use most, by far, which
> is the reason I'm interested).

The attack was uninteresting.  The paper seems to go on and on about
different ways that an attacker can steal source code by accessing a
poorly-secured SCM server.  This discussion is kind of moot for git,
where every single developer workstation has a complete copy of the
entire project history anyway.

An attack in which someone untraceably modified the repo to contain
modified code would be a little more interesting.  git makes this sort
of thing pretty much impossible to do without it being *noticeable* at
least.  Traceable, not so much, because you can create a commit with
whatever committer/author names you want and then push them in.
Commits aren't GPG-signed, only tags are, so there are lots of ways to
forge a commit from someone else and mess up the audit log.  At least
you can't edit old commits without people noticing, though.

Have fun,

Avery