From: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2005 15:28:41 GMT
Subject: Re: Re: Merge with git-pasky II.
Message-ID: <20050417152841.GA6157@elte.hu>
In-Reply-To: <20050417145232.GA5289@elte.hu>


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

> 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