commit_list.c
4.91 KB
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commit_list: fix possible buffer overflow in `commit_quick_parse` · 12bcc7a9
The function `commit_quick_parse` provides a way to quickly parse parts of a commit without storing or verifying most of its metadata. The first thing it does is calculating the number of parents by skipping "parent " lines until it finds the first non-parent line. Afterwards, this parent count is passed to `alloc_parents`, which will allocate an array to store all the parent. To calculate the amount of storage required for the parents array, `alloc_parents` simply multiplicates the number of parents with the respective elements's size. This already screams "buffer overflow", and in fact this problem is getting worse by the result being cast to an `uint32_t`. In fact, triggering this is possible: git-hash-object(1) will happily write a commit with multiple millions of parents for you. I've stopped at 67,108,864 parents as git-hash-object(1) unfortunately soaks up the complete object without streaming anything to disk and thus will cause an OOM situation at a later point. The point here is: this commit was about 4.1GB of size but compressed down to 24MB and thus easy to distribute. The above doesn't yet trigger the buffer overflow, thus. As the array's elements are all pointers which are 8 bytes on 64 bit, we need a total of 536,870,912 parents to trigger the overflow to `0`. The effect is that we're now underallocating the array and do an out-of-bound writes. As the buffer is kindly provided by the adversary, this may easily result in code execution. Extrapolating from the test file with 67m commits to the one with 536m commits results in a factor of 8. Thus the uncompressed contents would be about 32GB in size and the compressed ones 192MB. While still easily distributable via the network, only servers will have that amount of RAM and not cause an out-of-memory condition previous to triggering the overflow. This at least makes this attack not an easy vector for client-side use of libgit2.
Patrick Steinhardt committed