Re: Bug report - ssh signing causes git tag -l malloc failed

From: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Date: May 3, 2022, 01:02 UTC
Message-ID: <YnB/Pam2ti1A8c0e@nand.local>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq7d73y97i.fsf@gitster.g>

On Mon, May 02, 2022 at 01:24:01PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Brad Beam <brad.beam@b-rad.info> writes:
>
> Thanks for a report.
>
> > What did you do before the bug happened? (Steps to reproduce your
> > issue)
> >
> > When using ssh signing `git tag -l --format='%(contents:body)'
> > <tag>` returns `fatal: Out of memory, malloc failed (tried to
> > allocate 18446744073709551323 bytes)`
>
> An obvious first follow-up question is if there is any difference in
> behaviour if another kind of signing (like PGP) is used.

It works when using gpg.format=openpgp, and breaks reliably when signing using OpenSSH. The simplest reproduction I could come up with is:

    git init repo
    (
      cd repo
      >foo
      git add foo
      git commit -m "$(date)"
      git tag -sam foo foo
    )

I think the difference is that when signing with OpenPGP, the "foo" tag looks like this:

    $ git -C repo cat-file -p foo
    object d9b42c39c8520b2b9d62d67aa4138e1a28ce7aee
    type commit
    tag foo
    tagger Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com> 1651538928 -0400

    foo
    -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

    iQEzBAABCgAdFiEEuSAhSeE5DcWB+EsnUHZwBbY/KHsFAmJwe/AACgkQUHZwBbY/
    [...]

and with OpenSSH, the tag object looks like:

    $ git -C repo cat-file -p foo
    object 64303f1200e1114d91f250cede3245364b07fce7
    type commit
    tag foo
    tagger Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com> 1651538975 -0400

    foo
    -----BEGIN SSH SIGNATURE-----
    U1NIU0lHAAAAAQAAARcAAAAHc3NoLXJzYQAAAAMBAAEAAAEBAPKMdi3zhEm/soWtUUR9bZ
    [...]

note the missing newline after "-----BEGIN SSH SIGNATURE-----", which confuses ref-filter.c:find_subpos(). In particular, it seems to confuse the code near the comment "subject goes to first empty line before signature begins", since the OpenSSH-signed version of "foo" treats the entire message (including the signature itself) as the subject.

That puts buf after sigstart, meaning that *nonsiglen gets assigned to a negative number and overflows. Luckily this just results in a bogus malloc call which crashes us, so I don't think this is meaningfully exploitable.

The following diff seems to do the trick by restoring the intent of our "scooch batch 'eol' if it goes beyond 'sigstart'" to the case where we just assume the whole message is the subject. Folks more familiar with this code are more than welcome to chime in ;).

--- 8< ---

diff --git a/ref-filter.c b/ref-filter.c
index 7838bd22b8..1d69e28d68 100644
--- a/ref-filter.c
+++ b/ref-filter.c
@@ -1376,12 +1376,14 @@ static void find_subpos(const char *buf,
 	*sub = buf;
 	/* subject goes to first empty line before signature begins */
 	if ((eol = strstr(*sub, "\n\n"))) {
-		eol = eol < sigstart ? eol : sigstart;
+		;
 	/* check if message uses CRLF */
 	} else if (! (eol = strstr(*sub, "\r\n\r\n"))) {
 		/* treat whole message as subject */
 		eol = strrchr(*sub, '\0');
 	}
+	if (sigstart < eol)
+		eol = sigstart;
 	buf = eol;
 	*sublen = buf - *sub;
 	/* drop trailing newline, if present */
--- >8 ---

Thanks,
Taylor