checkout: fix bug that makes checkout follow symlinks in leading path

Before checking out a file, we have to confirm that all of its leading
components are real existing directories. And to reduce the number of
lstat() calls in this process, we cache the last leading path known to
contain only directories. However, when a path collision occurs (e.g.
when checking out case-sensitive files in case-insensitive file
systems), a cached path might have its file type changed on disk,
leaving the cache on an invalid state. Normally, this doesn't bring
any bad consequences as we usually check out files in index order, and
therefore, by the time the cached path becomes outdated, we no longer
need it anyway (because all files in that directory would have already
been written).

But, there are some users of the checkout machinery that do not always
follow the index order. In particular: checkout-index writes the paths
in the same order that they appear on the CLI (or stdin); and the
delayed checkout feature -- used when a long-running filter process
replies with "status=delayed" -- postpones the checkout of some entries,
thus modifying the checkout order.

When we have to check out an out-of-order entry and the lstat() cache is
invalid (due to a previous path collision), checkout_entry() may end up
using the invalid data and thrusting that the leading components are
real directories when, in reality, they are not. In the best case
scenario, where the directory was replaced by a regular file, the user
will get an error: "fatal: unable to create file 'foo/bar': Not a
directory". But if the directory was replaced by a symlink, checkout
could actually end up following the symlink and writing the file at a
wrong place, even outside the repository. Since delayed checkout is
affected by this bug, it could be used by an attacker to write
arbitrary files during the clone of a maliciously crafted repository.

Some candidate solutions considered were to disable the lstat() cache
during unordered checkouts or sort the entries before passing them to
the checkout machinery. But both ideas include some performance penalty
and they don't future-proof the code against new unordered use cases.

Instead, we now manually reset the lstat cache whenever we successfully
remove a directory. Note: We are not even checking whether the directory
was the same as the lstat cache points to because we might face a
scenario where the paths refer to the same location but differ due to
case folding, precomposed UTF-8 issues, or the presence of `..`
components in the path. Two regression tests, with case-collisions and
utf8-collisions, are also added for both checkout-index and delayed
checkout.

Note: to make the previously mentioned clone attack unfeasible, it would
be sufficient to reset the lstat cache only after the remove_subtree()
call inside checkout_entry(). This is the place where we would remove a
directory whose path collides with the path of another entry that we are
currently trying to check out (possibly a symlink). However, in the
interest of a thorough fix that does not leave Git open to
similar-but-not-identical attack vectors, we decided to intercept
all `rmdir()` calls in one fell swoop.

This addresses CVE-2021-21300.

Co-authored-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Matheus Tavares <matheus.bernardino@usp.br>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/compat/mingw.c b/compat/mingw.c
index b047e21..0c414d0 100644
--- a/compat/mingw.c
+++ b/compat/mingw.c
@@ -283,6 +283,8 @@ int mingw_rmdir(const char *pathname)
 	       ask_yes_no_if_possible("Deletion of directory '%s' failed. "
 			"Should I try again?", pathname))
 	       ret = _wrmdir(wpathname);
+	if (!ret)
+		invalidate_lstat_cache();
 	return ret;
 }