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.)
ghc 8 added backtraces on uncaught errors. This is great, but git-annex was
using error in many places for a error message targeted at the user, in
some known problem case. A backtrace only confuses such a message, so omit it.
Notably, commands like git annex drop that failed due to eg, numcopies,
used to use error, so had a backtrace.
This commit was sponsored by Ethan Aubin.
There should be no behavior changes in this commit, it just adds a more
expressive data type and adjusts code that had been passing around a [UUID]
or sometimes a Maybe Remote to instead use [VerifiedCopy].
Although, since some functions were taking two different [UUID] lists,
there's some potential for me to have gotten it horribly wrong.
