git-commit-vandalism/Documentation/config/safe.txt
Glen Choo 8d1a744820 setup.c: create safe.bareRepository
There is a known social engineering attack that takes advantage of the
fact that a working tree can include an entire bare repository,
including a config file. A user could run a Git command inside the bare
repository thinking that the config file of the 'outer' repository would
be used, but in reality, the bare repository's config file (which is
attacker-controlled) is used, which may result in arbitrary code
execution. See [1] for a fuller description and deeper discussion.

A simple mitigation is to forbid bare repositories unless specified via
`--git-dir` or `GIT_DIR`. In environments that don't use bare
repositories, this would be minimally disruptive.

Create a config variable, `safe.bareRepository`, that tells Git whether
or not to die() when working with a bare repository. This config is an
enum of:

- "all": allow all bare repositories (this is the default)
- "explicit": only allow bare repositories specified via --git-dir
  or GIT_DIR.

If we want to protect users from such attacks by default, neither value
will suffice - "all" provides no protection, but "explicit" is
impractical for bare repository users. A more usable default would be to
allow only non-embedded bare repositories ([2] contains one such
proposal), but detecting if a repository is embedded is potentially
non-trivial, so this work is not implemented in this series.

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/git/kl6lsfqpygsj.fsf@chooglen-macbookpro.roam.corp.google.com
[2]: https://lore.kernel.org/git/5b969c5e-e802-c447-ad25-6acc0b784582@github.com

Signed-off-by: Glen Choo <chooglen@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2022-07-14 15:08:29 -07:00

62 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext

safe.bareRepository::
Specifies which bare repositories Git will work with. The currently
supported values are:
+
* `all`: Git works with all bare repositories. This is the default.
* `explicit`: Git only works with bare repositories specified via
the top-level `--git-dir` command-line option, or the `GIT_DIR`
environment variable (see linkgit:git[1]).
+
If you do not use bare repositories in your workflow, then it may be
beneficial to set `safe.bareRepository` to `explicit` in your global
config. This will protect you from attacks that involve cloning a
repository that contains a bare repository and running a Git command
within that directory.
+
This config setting is only respected in protected configuration (see
<<SCOPES>>). This prevents the untrusted repository from tampering with
this value.
safe.directory::
These config entries specify Git-tracked directories that are
considered safe even if they are owned by someone other than the
current user. By default, Git will refuse to even parse a Git
config of a repository owned by someone else, let alone run its
hooks, and this config setting allows users to specify exceptions,
e.g. for intentionally shared repositories (see the `--shared`
option in linkgit:git-init[1]).
+
This is a multi-valued setting, i.e. you can add more than one directory
via `git config --add`. To reset the list of safe directories (e.g. to
override any such directories specified in the system config), add a
`safe.directory` entry with an empty value.
+
This config setting is only respected in protected configuration (see
<<SCOPES>>). This prevents the untrusted repository from tampering with this
value.
+
The value of this setting is interpolated, i.e. `~/<path>` expands to a
path relative to the home directory and `%(prefix)/<path>` expands to a
path relative to Git's (runtime) prefix.
+
To completely opt-out of this security check, set `safe.directory` to the
string `*`. This will allow all repositories to be treated as if their
directory was listed in the `safe.directory` list. If `safe.directory=*`
is set in system config and you want to re-enable this protection, then
initialize your list with an empty value before listing the repositories
that you deem safe.
+
As explained, Git only allows you to access repositories owned by
yourself, i.e. the user who is running Git, by default. When Git
is running as 'root' in a non Windows platform that provides sudo,
however, git checks the SUDO_UID environment variable that sudo creates
and will allow access to the uid recorded as its value in addition to
the id from 'root'.
This is to make it easy to perform a common sequence during installation
"make && sudo make install". A git process running under 'sudo' runs as
'root' but the 'sudo' command exports the environment variable to record
which id the original user has.
If that is not what you would prefer and want git to only trust
repositories that are owned by root instead, then you can remove
the `SUDO_UID` variable from root's environment before invoking git.