[PATCH 0/10] tree name and depth limits

There aren't currently any limits on the size of pathnames in tree objects, nor of the depth of recursive trees. This can create two problems:

  1. We process pathnames from trees as strings in lots of places, and
     we have a history of using "int" to access strings. I don't know of
     a specific problem area, but I have little doubt there is a spot
     where you can convince an "int" to overflow with a 2GB tree.

     In the long run it would be nice to fix all of that code to use
     size_t. And hopefully other audits to use st_add(), etc, for
     allocations mean that we'd avoid actual buffer overflows. But in
     the meantime, it sure would be nice to have another layer
     protecting us.

  2. Because we recurse for most tree algorithms, it's easy for a
     malicious tree to run you out of stack space and cause a segfault.
     By itself this isn't a security problem, but it's confusing for
     users. And if you happen to run a public hosting site and monitor
     your segfaults, it's awfully annoying to investigate each one to
     see if it's the first sign of a real attack, or if somebody is just
     throwing garbage at you.

So here are some patches I wrote for GitHub several years ago. They add limits on the size of a single pathname component, as well as on the depth we're willing to recurse when handling trees.

I kind of hate them, because I hate arbitrary limits. But I also think they can do some good in practice, and the default limits are set such that I doubt anybody will ever notice, let alone complain (they have been in place on github.com for 4+ years, and I don't recall ever getting any feedback from users who were not security researchers poking at the system).

And most operating systems have arbitrary limits (that are much smaller!) anyway. So if you plan to do exotic things like "run git-checkout", you'd run into problems way before you hit either of these.

So IMHO they'll do more good than harm.

The first three patches are cleanups / prep.

Patch 4 is the name limit.

Patches 5-10 implement the depth limits.

  [01/10]: tree-walk: reduce stack size for recursive functions
  [02/10]: tree-walk: drop MAX_TRAVERSE_TREES macro
  [03/10]: tree-walk: rename "error" variable
  [04/10]: fsck: detect very large tree pathnames
  [05/10]: add core.maxTreeDepth config
  [06/10]: traverse_trees(): respect max_allowed_tree_depth
  [07/10]: read_tree(): respect max_allowed_tree_depth
  [08/10]: list-objects: respect max_allowed_tree_depth
  [09/10]: tree-diff: respect max_allowed_tree_depth
  [10/10]: lower core.maxTreeDepth default to 2048

 Documentation/config/core.txt |  6 +++
 Documentation/fsck-msgids.txt |  7 +++
 config.c                      |  5 ++
 environment.c                 |  1 +
 environment.h                 |  1 +
 fsck.c                        | 24 ++++++++-
 fsck.h                        |  1 +
 list-objects.c                |  8 +++
 sparse-index.c                |  2 +-
 t/t1450-fsck.sh               | 10 ++++
 t/t6700-tree-depth.sh         | 93 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 tree-diff.c                   | 23 ++++++---
 tree-walk.c                   | 20 +++++---
 tree-walk.h                   |  2 -
 tree.c                        |  9 +++-
 tree.h                        |  1 +
 unpack-trees.c                |  9 +++-
 unpack-trees.h                |  2 +-
 wt-status.c                   |  2 +-
 19 files changed, 201 insertions(+), 25 deletions(-)
 create mode 100755 t/t6700-tree-depth.sh