Subject: Re: is gitosis secure?

From: Tommi Virtanen <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2009 10:26:50 -0800

On Wed, Feb 04, 2009 at 01:12:04PM +0100, Stephen R. van den Berg wrote:
> I installed gitosis a year ago.
> Then I tried to audit the code.
> I couldn't, the whole thing is too much spaghetti code.

Huh. It's about 1000 lines of python, with about 2000 lines of unit
tests. It has 3 top-level operations: init, serve, run_hook. That
still counts as "tiny" in my mind. I'm sorry if following the code was
too hard. I guess there's no accounting for taste.

> Auditing gitosis turned out to be too painful to be worth the trouble,
> so I reverted to a manually maintained git-shell solution which is so
> simple that I can actually audit it, and therefore is provably secure
> (which gitosis is not).

This word, "provably", tends to mean something else than what you use
it for. Definitely a simple audit doesn't prove anything. Most
real-world software is complex enough to be practically unprovable for
anything.

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