Web-based Git hosting services such as GitHub and GitLab are popular choices to manage and interact with Git repositories. However, they lack an important security feature -the ability to sign Git commits. Users instruct the server to perform repository operations on their behalf and have to trust that the server will execute their requests faithfully. Such trust may be unwarranted though because a malicious or a compromised server may execute the requested actions in an incorrect manner, leading to a different state of the repository than what the user intended.In this paper, we show a range of high-impact attacks that can be executed stealthily when developers use the web UI of a Git hosting service to perform common actions such as editing files or merging branches. We then propose le-git-imate, a defense against these attacks which provides security guarantees comparable and compatible with Git's standard commit signing mechanism. We implement le-git-imate as a Chrome browser extension. le-git-imate does not require changes on the server side and can thus be used immediately. It also preserves current workflows used in Github/GitLab and does not require the user to leave the browser, and it allows anyone to verify that the server's actions faithfully follow the user's requested actions. Moreover, experimental evaluation using the browser extension shows that le-git-imate has comparable performance with Git's standard commit signature mechanism. With our solution in place, users can take advantage of GitHub/GitLab's web-based features without sacrificing security, thus paving the way towards verifiable web-based Git repositories.
Although code review is an essential step for ensuring the quality of software, it is surprising that current code review systems do not have mechanisms to protect the integrity of the code review process. We uncover multiple attacks against the code review infrastructure which are easy to execute, stealthy in nature, and can have a significant impact, such as allowing malicious or buggy code to be merged and propagated to future releases. To improve this status quo, in this work we lay the foundations for securing the code review process. Towards this end, we first identify a set of key design principles necessary to secure the code review process. We then use these principles to propose SecureReview, a security mechanism that can be applied on top of a Git-based code review system to ensure the integrity of the code review process and provide verifiable guarantees that the code review process followed the intended review policy. We implement SecureReview as a Chrome browser extension for GitHub and Gerrit. Our security analysis shows that SecureReview is effective in mitigating the aforementioned attacks. An experimental evaluation shows that the SecureReview implementation only adds a slight storage overhead (i.e., less than 0.0006 of the repository size).
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