summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/doc/devblog/day_449__SHA1_break_day.mdwn
blob: a5287ff7cdf74e89767a2d73eb8ef9bec0067303 (plain)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
[The first SHA1 collision](https://shattered.io/) was announced today,
produced by an identical-prefix collision attack.

After looking into it all day, it does not appear to impact git's security
immediately, except for targeted attacks against specific projects by
very wealthy attackers. But we're well past the time when it seemed ok that git
uses SHA1. If this gets improved into a chosen-prefix collision
attack, git will start to be rather insecure.

Projects that store binary files in git, that might be worth $100k for an
attacker to backdoor **should** be concerned by the SHA1 collisions.
A good example of such a project is
<git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git>.
Using git-annex (with a suitable backend like SHA256) and signed commits
together is a good way to secure such repositories.

git-annex's SHA1 backend is already documented as only being 
"for those who want a checksum but are not concerned about
security", so no changes needed here.