Subject: Re: Git ransom campaign incident report - May 2019

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 20:59:47 +0200

On Wed, May 15 2019, Martin Langhoff wrote:

> Spotted this on the internet...
>
> https://github.blog/2019-05-14-git-ransom-campaign-incident-report/
>
> Haven't hacked on git for a while, and I am not affiliated with any of
> the stakeholders. However, reading it, I wanted to slam my head on the
> desk.
>
> IIRC, git will sanely store a password elsewhere if it gets to prompt
> for it. Should we be trying to unpack usernames/passwords from HTTP
> urls, and DTRT with them?
>
> Are there other ways this could be made better?

I think we should do nothing.

The linked blog post really manages to bury the lead. I guess you'll get
that when PR at three different companies gets a say. For those looking
for a brief summary, here's mine:

    Some people using git hosting sites "git clone"'d https URLs to
    their repos with username/passwords in them. They then pointed a
    webserver at their checked-out directory, and got pwned by someone
    scraping "/.git/config" from public websites looking for
    credentials.

Trying to mitigate this in git is just going to annoy users who are
doing this in the context of an otherwise secure workflow. The users who
were affected by this are probably also the sort of users who are
hardcoding their AWS password in some JavaScript checked into their
project or whatever, there's only so much you can do.

It's probably more productive to say convince whoever maintains the
default nginx/apache etc. docker image to default to some Fisher-Price
mode where dotfiles aren't served up by default.

Or, for GitLab/GitHub etc. to discourage use of https API tokens in
favor of SSH deploy keys. OpenSSH goes out of its way to not allow you
to provide paswords in URLs, on the command-line etc. in anticipation of
exactly this sort of scenario. Even then I've seen users write say
docker images where they manage to hardcode an SSH private key in a
public image out of convenience or lazyness (say needing "git clone"
something during the image build).