• 0 Posts
  • 66 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle




  • A balance has to be struck. The alternative isn’t not getting anything better, it’s being sure the benefits are worth the costs. The comment was “Why is [adding another decoder] a negative?” There is a cost to it, and while most people don’t think about this stuff, someone does.

    The floppy code was destined to be removed from Linux because no one wanted to maintain it and it had such a small user base. Fortunately I think some people stepped up to look after it but that could have made preserving old software significantly harder.

    If image formats get abandoned, browsers are going to face hard decisions as to whether to drop support. There has to be some push-back to over-proliferation of formats or we could be in a worse position than now, where there are only two or three viable browser alternatives that can keep up with the churn of web technologies.









  • I guess the funny thing is that each Git commit is internally just a file. Branches and tags are just links to specific commit files and of course commits link to their parents. If a branch gets deleted or jumped back to a previous commit, the orphaned commits are still left in the filesystem. Various Git actions can trigger a garbage collection, but unless you generate huge diffs, they usually stick around for a really long time. Determining if a commit is orphaned is work that Git usually doesn’t bother doing. There’s also a reflog that can let you recover lost commits if you make a mistake.



  • I think Github keeps all the commits of forks in a single pool. So if someone commits a secret to one fork, that commit could be looked up in any of them, even if the one that was committed to was private/is deleted/no references exist to the commit.

    The big issue is discovery. If no-one has pulled the leaky commit onto a fork, then the only way to access it is to guess the commit hash. Github makes this easier for you:

    What’s more, Ayrey explained, you don’t even need the full identifying hash to access the commit. “If you know the first four characters of the identifier, GitHub will almost auto-complete the rest of the identifier for you,” he said, noting that with just sixty-five thousand possible combinations for those characters, that’s a small enough number to test all the possibilities.

    I think all GitHub should do is prune orphaned commits from the auto-suggestion list. If someone grabbed the complete commit ID then they probably grabbed the content already anyway.


  • Ah - Actually reading the article reveals why this is actually an issue:

    What’s more, Ayrey explained, you don’t even need the full identifying hash to access the commit. “If you know the first four characters of the identifier, GitHub will almost auto-complete the rest of the identifier for you,” he said, noting that with just sixty-five thousand possible combinations for those characters, that’s a small enough number to test all the possibilities.

    So enumerating all the orphan commits wouldn’t be that hard.

    In any case if a secret has been publicly disclosed, you should always assume it’s still out there. For sure, rotate your keys.


  • Well, sort of. GitHub certainly could refuse to render orphan commits. They pop up a banner saying so but I don’t see why they should show the commit at all. They could still keep the data until it’s garbage collected since a user might re-upload the commit in a new branch.

    This seems like a non-issue though since someone who hasn’t already seen the disclosed information would need to somehow determine the hash of the deleted commit.



  • ----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
    iQIzBAEBCgAdFiEETYf5hKIig5JX/jalu9uZGunHyUIFAmaB8YEACgkQu9uZGunH
    yUKi7Q/+OJPzHWfGPtzk53KnMJ3GC8KQGEUCzKkSKmE0ugdI9h1Lj4SkvHpKWECK
    Y1GxNujMPRM/aAS2M97AEbtYolenWzgYmO1wt131/hEG4tk+iYeB2Sfyvngbg5KI
    y4D7mqpcVWYSf6S13vUX8VuyKeTxK6xdkp95E0wPVLfJwx5o5nH0njLXxeW0IblY
    URLonem/yuBrJ6Ny3XX9+sKRKcdI9tOqhMhTxPcQySXcTx1pAG7YE7G5UqTbJxis
    wy7LbYZB5Yy0FO3CtRIkA+cclG4y2RMM9M9buHzXTWCyDuoQao68yEVh4OdqwH1U
    5AUnqdve5SiwygF/vc50Ila6VjJ4hyz1qVQnjqqD96p7CSVzVudLDDZMQZ8WvqLh
    qaFr51xJvH6p6/CP1ji4HHucbJf6BhtSqc8ID9KFfaXxjfZHiUtgsVDYMV0e7u9v
    lhcDH/3kmw/JImX25qsEsBeQyzOJsBvxOYD3lZrwSY9+7KNGVQstFrEvCuVPHr72
    BQJPIhg3+9g6m36+9Uhs1N6b8G9DsZ6OgnNqr9dGturUg6CtRsLSpqoZq0FT9cLA
    tnFTJDaXgx1DZnsLGDSoQQYjZ3vS+YYZ8jG86KGLFyXVK+uSssvorm9YR1/GGOy7
    suaxro72An+MxCczF5TIR9n3gisKvcwa8ZbdoaGd9cigyzWlYg8=
    =EgZm
    ----END PGP SIGNATURE-----