By ‘Git instances’ they mean Gogs instances that allow open registration. I know most of the community moved from Gogs to Gitea, and then to Forgejo, but thought this was still worth noting.
this is what I’m talking about when it comes to the selfhosted communities.
if you don’t know how to properly segment and vlan your network, you have no business exposing your shit to the internet.
While good, network security isnt the issue. Its running a web service with open registration allowing randos to upload content that gets processed by the server.
Throw this up on a dedicated $5 VPS and you still have a problem. The default should be manual registration by admins.
Here are the steps:
- The attacker creates a standard Git repository.
- They commit a single symbolic link pointing to a sensitive target.
- Using the PutContents API, they write data to the symlink. The system follows the link and overwrites the target file outside the repository.
- By overwriting .git/config (specifically the sshCommand), the attacker can force the system to execute arbitrary commands–
amazing.
Especially since any version of Git from the last view years has a passionate hatred of symlinks for this reason, which is a bit annoying if you’ve a legit usecase. They’re either very out-of-date, or have done some very foolish customisation…
I think the ZIP standard has something similar and it causes similar problems.
It’s because of the old notion of “be generous in what you accept and strict in what you send”. I think the error is something about adding more parent directories so that part of your zip file will be extracted above the selected directory. Not all implementations of zip support this “feature”.
There are also all kinds of stupid ancient features in tar and zip from a time when hard drives were measured in megabytes or less. The latest episode of the open source security podcast talks about it.
We also have COW filesystems now. If you need large datasets in different places, used by different projects, etc, just copy them and use BTRFS or ZFS or whatever. It wont take any space and be safer. Git also has multiple ways of connecting external data artifacts. Git should by default reject symlinks.
Git itself (Or any other VCS for that matter) really should treat symlinks as special, similar as to how btrfs stores everything as “reflinks” internally. They be stored as special references to other tracked objects (so it’d be impossible to commit a symlink that pointed at anything other than a checked-in file, and ensure they always match), and git can materialise them as needed.
People have open registration on those things… Thats… Brave…
I have my own gitea instance in my homelab but of course its not accessable from the internet.
I wonder if it’d be feasible to make a fediverse github
An interesting similar idea is https://github.com/gitsocial-org/gitsocial
“Decentralized open-source Git-native social network”
Git is already a distributed version control system.
But it doesn’t have any built-in concept of users, write permissions, or authentication (except for commit signing)
Hosting an unauthenticated git repo would be the equivalent to an open ssh port with no password required
Not to mention collaborative things like issue tracking, PRs, forums, etc
Forgejo has all that, and then you can achieve “federation” by virtue of pushing to whatever remote. I wasn’t suggesting people use git itself (which is possible). I just meant that it’s distributed as opposed to centralized like Subverison is.
Well but distributed != federated. Which is why Forgejo is currently working on a federation feature.
There was a discussion on Forgejo and ActivityPub IIRC
Edit: this is what you’re looking for: https://forgefed.org/
Well that kinda kills collaboration
You can git pull a repo to your machine, make your changes and then use git to submit a patch via email. Its not pretty, but it works. Hopefully federation is built soon and you will be able to submit a pull request from your own forge.
Yeah. If I needed collaboration, I would just whitelist their ips or require everyone involved to use Wireguard vpn, Tailscale or other solutions that allows access without being publically exposed.
That kills collaboration from new people who just, like, discovered your project on some Lemmy thread
They can still collaborate old school way. You can publish static mirrors of git, then take email patches lol
I do the same thing. Anything I put on there isn’t something that I would share with the Internet anyway. If it was a serious project, sure. It’s just nice to have a personal git you can access over a VPN sometimes.
I can’t understand why anyone would waste time writing code that won’t be shared
Dunno, I just don’t believe my NixOS config files are particularly valuable. What is the benefit of sharing garbage code from a novice? I’d rather share things worth sharing, that could be useful to someone else.
Personal projects. Not everything has to be FOSS. My tiny little script to automate my lights turning green and my smart speaker playing All-Star by Smash Mouth at full volume, so I can jork it in peace? That shit doesn’t need to be public.
Home Assistant hs communities to share exactly that
My similar script has a very different goal: at midnight if someone is still up, it dims the family room light and announces on speaker”hey kids, it’s time for bed”
Yes, it needs to be public. The videos too.
Take my money.
For personal use? To automate tasks you do or solve a problem you have? Or people use git repos for notes and the like too
For personal use. As someone who has all my non-trivial creations, including dot-files and scripts I replicate between machines, in repos since CVS has a thing it’s a habit. Version control. This stuff is mostly private but not secret, why should I have it public?
Edit after spell check.
Don’t kink shame, man
I keep mine accessible from the internet, its just more useful to me like that. I do have registration disabled though and SSO is handled by Authentik so it could be worse (my personal goal has just been to not be the easiest target, perfect security is a myth in my mind).
Theres a HUGE difference between hosting it essentially read-only to the world, vs allowing account creation, uploading, and processing unknown files by the server.
I have thought of blocking access to the commit history pages at the reverse proxy to cut off 99% of the traffic from bots. If anyone wants to look at the history, its just a git clone away.
You could also throw it behind mTLD
I could, but then I would have issues getting to it from work; from the bit I’ve read about mTLS, it’s not really indended for my use case, I think I’ll just stick with TLS.
My motto is ‘Users cause complexities and complexities cause problems’.
It is because it is the default
Good note, and good callout, we should always call out these things.
But yes if you’re self hosting and you both have a public facing instance and allow open registration, you are a much much braver person than I.
I’m not allowing random people hosting their git repos on mine but it’s public and they can fork my own stuff on it in theoretically upload some bullshit.
Any time you have a server willing to process random data uploaded from randos, just expect it to be compromised eventually and prepare for the eventuality by isolating it, backing it up religiously, and setting up good monitoring of some sort. Doesnt matter if its a forge, a wiki, or like nextcloud or whatever. It will happen.
To anyone afraid of the above conclusion, a dedicated $5 VPS with automatic snapshots get you a long way.
Got curious and lurked your profile. You might want to update your about from Lemmy to PieFed 🙂
Oh, there is still some Lemmy link somewhere? I’m trying to find it but couldn’t, where did you see it?
Oh actually it’s on your homepage (jeena.net) in the About section on the left side
Aah, there it was, thanks! Fixed.
I live in South Korea, brew beer
Way off topic, but I use to be a prolific brewer of beer. In fact the rig that I built can turn 50 gallons of wort in about 3 hours and it’s ready to pitch the yeast in. Brewing beer is a very fascinating process. I also made meads, wines, and have dabbled in sake, tho I wouldn’t say my sake was ready for prime time. LOL And you are a musician. I already like you and I don’t even know you. LOL
Haha, yeah, although some of my hobbies slowed down a lot since I got a family. Small children really take up a lot of time.
Today for example the 2.5 years old ate a lot of potato’s and schnitzel without really chewing. Then he drank a ton of milk after dinner. While his big sister already went to bed at 21:30 he was still jumping on the bed at 22:00 und suddenly he puked out everything on the bed. So we had to clean RhE bed, the floor, him and us, was everything, shower etc.
Now it’s 23:00 and he is still excited about it and is singing in the freshly made bed instead of sleeping.
Actually we wanted to watch a episode of some TV series bit now it’s way too late for this.
https://git.30p87.de/users/sign_up uhm… oops
If i remember correctly on my gitea (now forgejo) the default is open registration which really shouldn’t be the case for projects that are targeted towards self hosters.
My inital install was a long time ago so I don’t remember for sure
This absolutely. Anyone who actually wants open registration will be configuring their own SSO or whatever backend. The default should be safe for testing and/or hobbyists.
Yeah in my project open registration is behind an option called
yes_i_am_very_very_sure_i_want_an_open_registration_server_prone_to_abuselolHonestly, this is always more effective than a comment in the config because it can get removed. All it would take is a popular guide having the config with that option on and the comment gone.
Reading between the lines I feel like when you say “Targeted towards self hosters” what you mean is “John Q Hobbyist who doesn’t know any better”
And in response to that I would contend that Gitea is not actually targeted at those folks, though they obviously use it. Gitea is FOSS but it’s still “targeted” at professionals.
I’m a current gitea user… should I be moving to forgejo?
Yes, even without this current news.
Thanks! I’ll add it to the todo list.
I just did it not long a ago. Gittea -> Forgejo10 -> Forgejo11 LTS, in Docker. Surprisingly quick, painless and smooth.
(My only issue was not Forgejo, but MySQL. Because the hardware is ancient and Docker compose pulled down a new version of mysql8 at the same time as pulling forgejo. New version of mysql8 didnt support my CPU architecture. Easy fix was to change the label mysql8oraclelinux7 in Docker compose and pull that image. There is a issue with solutions in the MySQL Docker GitHub repo)
Doesn’t Forgejo support SQLite as a backend?
To be honest I don’t remember why I set up gitea with MySQL instead of sqlite (or MariaDB), its quite a few years ago. And sqlite would probably be fine for my single-user instance
Yes, although MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL are the more robust options.
If MySQL is more robust than SQLite of all things, something is going seriously wrong.
Then again, it’s 2025. I no longer bet on what to expect from reality. Next someone points me to a mail indicating linux kernel will move its bookkeeping to MongoDB.
Doesn’t seem like Gitea has that issue, and just keep registrations disabled if possible and if your projects allow, avoid symlinking.
deleted by creator
- 🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣
- Some1 needs to commiș me to make a clock captça w/mandatory certificate X verificaș, so ↓ 💩 never occurs.
- Xenoglossophobics, bm
lmfao that’s a lot of alts. Seems that my suspicion was correct: the exploiter is a threadiverse user.
I think it’s more likely that 29 people feel pretty strongly negative about your writing style.
Not the 3-4 minutes instant downvotes🤣 after my reply. It wasn’t even 3 minutes unto my response, and I got 12 downvotes across threadiverse instances.
The others forgot to read part 3.
No, we read part three, it just comes off pretentious enough that we think it still deserves a downvote. It’s not a foreign language anxiety; you’re posting in English. It’s just the next rendition of l33t speak, and no one is really in a hurry for that to catch back on again, those were dar days. I did eventually block the last guy that was hot on thorns, might get to you eventually, but it would be a shame, because outside of the ridiculous way you said it, your point isn’t wrong.
pretentious
you’re […] dar […] isn’tStop using contractions then, laughing my ass off.
eventually block the last guy that was hot on thorns
Literally what I asked you to do, mobster.
If you wouldn’t have been grumpy about downvotes, i’d have left it be :)
The community is speaking to you.
I literally laughing, why would I want to grump about grammarians? I’m literally against mob rule, esp. by pressers.
What’s more likely, few guys created numerous accounts just to downvote your spam or people just tend to dislike spam?
Former.
You know I am an anarchist?
We have a whole host of /c/raid communities, even fash instances.
Also refresh 🧵
At least we agree it’s spam
