The attacker could just send a very lot of data, with no \n and it would
all be buffered in memory until the kernel killed git-annex or perhaps OOM
killed some other more valuable process.
This is a low impact security hole, only affecting communication between
local git-annex and git-annex-shell on the remote system. (With either
able to be the attacker). Only those with the right ssh key can do it. And,
there are probably lots of ways to construct git repositories that make git
use a lot of memory in various ways, which would have similar impact as
this attack.
The fix in P2P/IO.hs would have been higher impact, if it had made it to a
released version, since it would have allowed DOSing the tor hidden
service without needing to authenticate.
(The LockContent and NotifyChanges instances may not be really
exploitable; since the line is read and ignored, it probably gets read
lazily and does not end up staying buffered in memory.)
I'm unsure why this fixed it, but it did. Seems to suggest that the
memory leak is not due to a bug in my code, but that ghc didn't manage
to take full advantage of laziness, or was failing to gc something it
could have.
The switch to hGetMetered subtly changed the laziness of how DATA was
read, and broke git protocol relaying. Fix by sending received data to
the git process's stdin immediately, which ensures that the lazy
bytestring is all read from the peer before going on to process the next
message from the peer.
Display progress meter on send and receive from remote.
Added a new hGetMetered that can read an exact number of bytes (or
less), updating a meter as it goes.
This commit was sponsored by Andreas on Patreon.
