The libgit2 project fixed three security issues in the 1.7.2 release. These issues are:

• The git_revparse_single function can potentially enter an infinite loop on a well-crafted input, potentially causing a Denial of Service. This function is exposed in the git2 crate via the Repository::revparse_single method.
• The git_index_add function may cause heap corruption and possibly lead to arbitrary code execution. This function is exposed in the git2 crate via the Index::add method.
• The smart transport negotiation may experience an out-of-bounds read when a remote server did not advertise capabilities.

The libgit2-sys crate bundles libgit2, or optionally links to a system libgit2 library. In either case, versions of the libgit2 library less than 1.7.2 are vulnerable. The 0.16.2 release of libgit2-sys bundles the fixed version of 1.7.2, and requires a system libgit2 version of at least 1.7.2.

It is recommended that all users upgrade.

Summary

gitoxide uses SHA-1 hash implementations without any collision detection, leaving it vulnerable to hash collision attacks.

Details

gitoxide uses the sha1_smol or sha1 crate, both of which implement standard SHA-1 without any mitigations for collision attacks. This means that two distinct Git objects with colliding SHA-1 hashes would break the Git object model and integrity checks when used with gitoxide.

The SHA-1 function is considered cryptographically insecure. However, in the wake of the SHAttered attacks, this issue was mitigated in Git 2.13.0 in 2017 by using the sha1collisiondetection algorithm by default and producing an error when known SHA-1 collisions are detected. Git is in the process of migrating to using SHA-256 for object hashes, but this has not been rolled out widely yet and gitoxide does not support SHA-256 object hashes.

PoC

The following program demonstrates the problem, using the two SHAttered PDFs:

use sha1_checked::{CollisionResult, Digest};

fn sha1_oid_of_file(filename: &str) -> gix::ObjectId {
    let mut hasher = gix::features::hash::hasher(gix::hash::Kind::Sha1);
    hasher.update(&std::fs::read(filename).unwrap());
    gix::ObjectId::Sha1(hasher.digest())
}

fn sha1dc_oid_of_file(filename: &str) -> Result<gix::ObjectId, String> {
    // Matches Git’s behaviour.
    let mut hasher = sha1_checked::Builder::default().safe_hash(false).build();
    hasher.update(&std::fs::read(filename).unwrap());
    match hasher.try_finalize() {
        CollisionResult::Ok(digest) => Ok(gix::ObjectId::Sha1(digest.into())),
        CollisionResult::Mitigated(_) => unreachable!(),
        CollisionResult::Collision(digest) => Err(format!(
            "Collision attack: {}",
            gix::ObjectId::Sha1(digest.into()).to_hex()
        )),
    }
}

fn main() {
    dbg!(sha1_oid_of_file("shattered-1.pdf"));
    dbg!(sha1_oid_of_file("shattered-2.pdf"));
    dbg!(sha1dc_oid_of_file("shattered-1.pdf"));
    dbg!(sha1dc_oid_of_file("shattered-2.pdf"));
}

The output is as follows:

[src/main.rs:24:5] sha1_oid_of_file("shattered-1.pdf") = Sha1(38762cf7f55934b34d179ae6a4c80cadccbb7f0a)
[src/main.rs:25:5] sha1_oid_of_file("shattered-2.pdf") = Sha1(38762cf7f55934b34d179ae6a4c80cadccbb7f0a)
[src/main.rs:26:5] sha1dc_oid_of_file("shattered-1.pdf") = Err(
    "Collision attack: 38762cf7f55934b34d179ae6a4c80cadccbb7f0a",
)
[src/main.rs:27:5] sha1dc_oid_of_file("shattered-2.pdf") = Err(
    "Collision attack: 38762cf7f55934b34d179ae6a4c80cadccbb7f0a",
)

The latter behaviour matches Git.

Since the SHAttered PDFs are not in a valid format for Git objects, a direct proof‐of‐concept using higher‐level APIs cannot be immediately demonstrated without significant computational resources.

Impact

An attacker with the ability to mount a collision attack on SHA-1 like the SHAttered or SHA-1 is a Shambles attacks could create two distinct Git objects with the same hash. This is becoming increasingly affordable for well‐resourced attackers, with the Shambles researchers in 2020 estimating $45k for a chosen‐prefix collision or $11k for a classical collision, and projecting less than $10k for a chosen‐prefix collision by 2025. The result could be used to disguise malicious repository contents, or potentially exploit assumptions in the logic of programs using gitoxide to cause further vulnerabilities.

This vulnerability affects any user of gitoxide, including gix-* library crates, that reads or writes Git objects.

When a Some(...) value was passed to the properties argument of either of these functions, a use-after-free would result.

In practice this would nearly always result in OpenSSL treating the properties as an empty string (due to CString::drop's behavior).

The maintainers thank quitbug for reporting this vulnerability to us.