Re: Git and SHA-1 security (again)

On Mon, 18 Jul 2016, Herczeg Zsolt wrote:

quoted

In particular, as far as I know and as Theodore Ts'o's post describes
better than I could[1], you seem to be confusing preimage attacks with
collision attacks, and then concluding that because SHA1 is vulnerable
to collision attacks that use-cases that would need a preimage attack
to be compromised (which as far is I can tell, includes all your
examples) are also "broken".

I understand the differences between the collision and preimage
attacks. A collision attack is not that bad for git in a typical
use-case. But I think that it's important to note that there are many
use-cases which do need a hash safe from collision attack. Some
examples:

You maintain a repository with gittorrent with signed commits Others
can use these signatures to verify it's original. Let's say you
include some safe file (potentially binary) from a third-party
contributor. That would be fine if the hash algo is safe. Currently
there is the possibility that you received a (safe) file which was
made to collide with another malicious one. Once you committed (and
signed) that file, the attacker joins the gittorrent network and
starts to distribute the malicious file. Suddenly most of your clients
pulling are infected however your signature is correct.

Or, you would like to make a continuous delivery system, where you use
signed tags. The delivery happens only when signature is right, and
the signer is responsible for it. Your colleague makes a collision,
pushes the good-file. You make all the tests, everything is fine, sign
and push and wait for the delivery to happen. Your colleague changes
the file on the server. The delivery makes a huge mass, and you're
fired.

Or, let's say you use a service like github, which is nice enough to
make a repository for you, with .gitignore, licenses and everything.
Likely, you'll never change dose files. Let's say that service made
one of those initial files to collide something bad. That means, they
can "infect" anyone, who is pulling your repo.

Do you need more hypothetical stories? There are a lot. Of course they
need a lot of work, and they're unlikely to happen. But it's possible.
If you need trust, and gpg signatures that means you need ultimate
trust. What's the point in making GPG signatures anyway if you cannot
ultimately trust them? You could just as well say: well that's
repository is only reachable by trustworthy persons, everything here
is just fine and really made by the person named in the "author
field".

All of your examples are actually preimage attacks. If the bad guy can tamper 
with the both the 'safe' and 'malicious' versions of the file, they don't 
actually need the malicious version, they can attack you through the one you 
think is 'safe'

The 'collision' attack isn't that there is some increased chance of a random 
file colliding with your safe file, it's that if you are manipulating the 
contents of both files, you can create two that collide. This won't hurt a Git 
repository unless one of these manipulated files is able to be introduced as a 
legitimate part of the repo you are dealing with.

David Lang