[Bitcoin-development] bitcoin pull requests

Will will at phase.net
Mon Apr 1 22:10:26 UTC 2013


The threat of a SHA1 collision attack to insert a malicious pull request
are tiny compared with the other threats - e.g. github being compromised,
one of the core developers' passwords being compromised, one of the core
developers going rogue, sourceforge (distribution site) being compromised
etc etc... believe me there's a lot more to worry about than a SHA1
attack...

Not meaning to scare, just to put things in perspective - this is why we
all need to peer review each others commits and keep an eye out for
suspicious commits, leverage the benefits of this project being open source
and easily peer reviewed.

Will


On 1 April 2013 23:52, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
>
> On 1 April 2013 20:28, Petr Praus <petr at praus.net> wrote:
>
>> An attacker would have to find a collision between two specific pieces of
>> code - his malicious code and a useful innoculous code that would be
>> accepted as pull request. This is the second, much harder case in the
>> birthday problem. When people talk about SHA-1 being broken they actually
>> mean the first case in the birthday problem - find any two arbitrary values
>> that hash to the same value. So, no I don't think it's a feasible attack
>> vector any time soon.
>>
>> Besides, with that kind of hashing power, it might be more feasible to
>> cause problems in the chain by e.g. constantly splitting it.
>>
>
> OK, maybe im being *way* too paranoid here ... but what if someone had
> access to github, could they replace one file with one they had prepared at
> some point?
>
>
>>
>>
>> On 1 April 2013 03:26, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>  I was just looking at:
>>>
>>> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4571.0
>>>
>>> I'm just curious if there is a possible attack vector here based on the
>>> fact that git uses the relatively week SHA1
>>>
>>> Could a seemingly innocuous pull request generate another file with a
>>> backdoor/nonce combination that slips under the radar?
>>>
>>> Apologies if this has come up before ...
>>>
>>>
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>>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> Compete for recognition, cash, and the chance to get your game
> on Steam. $5K grand prize plus 10 genre and skill prizes.
> Submit your demo by 6/6/13. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel_levelupd2d
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