[PATCH 2/2] fsck: downgrade gitmodulesParse default to "info"

We added an fsck check in ed8b10f631 (fsck: check .gitmodules content, 2018-05-02) as a defense against the vulnerability from 0383bbb901 (submodule-config: verify submodule names as paths, 2018-04-30). With the idea that up-to-date hosting sites could protect downstream unpatched clients that fetch from them.

As part of that defense, we reject any ".gitmodules" entry that is not syntactically valid. The theory is that if we cannot even parse the file, we cannot accurately check it for vulnerabilities. And anybody with a broken .gitmodules file would eventually want to know anyway.

But there are a few reasons this is a bad tradeoff in practice:

 - for this particular vulnerability, the client has to be
   able to parse the file. So you cannot sneak an attack
   through using a broken file, assuming the config parsers
   for the process running fsck and the eventual victim are
   functionally equivalent.

 - a broken .gitmodules file is not necessarily a problem.
   Our fsck check detects .gitmodules in _any_ tree, not
   just at the root. And the presence of a .gitmodules file
   does not necessarily mean it will be used; you'd have to
   also have gitlinks in the tree. The cgit repository, for
   example, has a file named .gitmodules from a
   pre-submodule attempt at sharing code, but does not
   actually have any gitlinks.

 - when the fsck check is used to reject a push, it's often
   hard to work around. The pusher may not have full control
   over the destination repository (e.g., if it's on a
   hosting server, they may need to contact the hosting
   site's support). And the broken .gitmodules may be too
   far back in history for rewriting to be feasible (again,
   this is an issue for cgit).

So we're being unnecessarily restrictive without actually improving the security in a meaningful way. It would be more convenient to downgrade this check to "info", which means we'd still comment on it, but not reject a push. Site admins can already do this via config, but we should ship sensible defaults.

There are a few counterpoints to consider in favor of keeping the check as an error:

 - the first point above assumes that the config parsers for
   the victim and the fsck process are equivalent. This is
   pretty true now, but as time goes on will become less so.
   Hosting sites are likely to upgrade their version of Git,
   whereas vulnerable clients will be stagnant (if they did
   upgrade, they'd cease to be vulnerable!). So in theory we
   may see drift over time between what two config parsers
   will accept.

   In practice, this is probably OK. The config format is
   pretty established at this point and shouldn't change a
   lot. And the farther we get from the announcement of the
   vulnerability, the less interesting this extra layer of
   protection becomes. I.e., it was _most_ valuable on day
   0, when everybody's client was still vulnerable and
   hosting sites could protect people. But as time goes on
   and people upgrade, the population of vulnerable clients
   becomes smaller and smaller.

 - In theory this could protect us from other
   vulnerabilities in the future. E.g., .gitmodules are the
   only way for a malicious repository to feed data to the
   config parser, so this check could similarly protect
   clients from a future (to-be-found) bug there.

   But that's trading a hypothetical case for real-world
   pain today. If we do find such a bug, the hosting site
   would need to be updated to fix it, too. At which point
   we could figure out whether it's possible to detect
   _just_ the malicious case without hurting existing
   broken-but-not-evil cases.

 - Until recently, we hadn't made any restrictions on
   .gitmodules content. So now in tightening that we're
   hitting cases where certain things used to work, but
   don't anymore. There's some moderate pain now. But as
   time goes on, we'll see more (and more varied) cases that
   will make tightening harder in the future. So there's
   some argument for putting rules in place _now_, before
   users grow more cases that violate them.

   Again, this is trading pain now for hypothetical benefit
   in the future. And if we try hard in the future to keep
   our tightening to a minimum (i.e., rejecting true
   maliciousness without hurting broken-but-not-evil repos),
   then that reduces even the hypothetical benefit.

Considering both sets of arguments, it makes sense to loosen this check for now.

Note that we have to tweak the test in t7415 since fsck will no longer consider this a fatal error. But we still check that it reports the warning, and that we don't get the spurious error from the config code.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
---
 fsck.c                     | 2 +-
 t/t7415-submodule-names.sh | 2 +-
 2 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)