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authorLibravatar brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>2022-01-17 21:56:17 +0000
committerLibravatar Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>2022-01-17 14:17:51 -0800
commit47efda967cfd4ef9d39de149e1e3654b051e5d19 (patch)
treeeaad46f2f6e5aadd84ef66ef9de98d16e375a3a4 /Documentation/technical/racy-git.txt
parentwrapper: add a helper to generate numbers from a CSPRNG (diff)
downloadtgif-47efda967cfd4ef9d39de149e1e3654b051e5d19.tar.xz
wrapper: use a CSPRNG to generate random file names
The current way we generate random file names is by taking the seconds and microseconds, plus the PID, and mixing them together, then encoding them. If this fails, we increment the value by 7777, and try again up to TMP_MAX times. Unfortunately, this is not the best idea from a security perspective. If we're writing into TMPDIR, an attacker can guess these values easily and prevent us from creating any temporary files at all by creating them all first. Even though we set TMP_MAX to 16384, this may be achievable in some contexts, even if unlikely to occur in practice. Fortunately, we can simply solve this by using the system cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator (CSPRNG) to generate a random 64-bit value, and use that as before. Note that there is still a small bias here, but because a six-character sequence chosen out of 62 characters provides about 36 bits of entropy, the bias here is less than 2^-28, which is acceptable, especially considering we'll retry several times. Note that the use of a CSPRNG in generating temporary file names is also used in many libcs. glibc recently changed from an approach similar to ours to using a CSPRNG, and FreeBSD and OpenBSD also use a CSPRNG in this case. Even if the likelihood of an attack is low, we should still be at least as responsible in creating temporary files as libc is. Signed-off-by: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
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