Re: Re: Merge with git-pasky II.

From: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Date: Apr 17, 2005, 15:28 UTC
Message-ID: <20050417152841.GA6157@elte.hu>
In-Reply-To: <20050417145232.GA5289@elte.hu>

* Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> The compromise relies on you having reviewed something harmless, while 
> in reality what happened within the DB was far less harmless. And the 
> DB remains self-consistent: neither fsck, nor others importing your 
> tree will be able to detect the compromise. This attack can only be 
> detected when you apply the patch, after that point all the 
> information (except Malice's message in your inbox) is gone.

in fact, this attack cannot even be proven to be malicious, purely via the email from Malice: it could be incredible bad luck that caused that good-looking patch to be mistakenly matching a dangerous object.

In fact this could happen even today, _accidentally_. (but i'm willing to bet that hell will be freezing over first, and i'll have some really good odds ;) There's probably a much higher likelyhood of Linus' tree getting corrupted in some old fashioned way and introducing a security hole by accident)

	Ingo