Re: Tricking peer review

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludovic.courtes@inria.fr>]

Hi,

Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> skribis:

> On Fri, Oct 15, 2021 at 08:54:09PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> The trick is easy: we give a URL that’s actually 404, with the hash of a
>> file that can be found on Software Heritage (in this case, that of
>> ‘grep-3.4.tar.xz’).  When downloading the source, the automatic
>> content-addressed fallback kicks in, and voilà:
> [...]
>> Thoughts?
>
> It's a real risk... another illustration that our security model trusts
> committers implicitly (not saying that's a bad thing or even avoidable).
>
> In years past I mentioned a similar technique but based on using
> old/vulnerable versions of security-critical packages like OpenSSL. The
> same approach would have worked since we started using Nix's
> content-addressed mirror.

Right.  Like zimoun wrote, the SWH fallback makes this even more
stealthily exploitable.

>> It’s nothing new, it’s what I do when I want to test the download
>> fallbacks (see also ‘GUIX_DOWNLOAD_FALLBACK_TEST’ in commit
>> c4a7aa82e25503133a1bd33148d17968c899a5f5).  Still, I wonder if it could
>> somehow be abused to have malicious packages pass review.
>
> Nice feature! Sorry if this was already suggested, but is it possible to
> create an argument to this variable that disallows use of the fallback
> mechanisms? I would certainly use that while reviewing and testing my
> own patches.

Yes, you can do “GUIX_DOWNLOAD_FALLBACK_TEST=none” (added in
bd61d62182bfda4a695757ec66810b28e8e1a6d0).

Thanks,
Ludo’.