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GitHub Hacked
MrSeb writes "Over the weekend, developer Egor Homakov exploited a gaping vulnerability in GitHub that allowed him (or anyone else with basic hacker know-how) to gain administrator access to projects such as Ruby on Rails, Linux, and millions of others. GitHub uses the Ruby on Rails application framework, and Rails has been weak to what's known as a mass-assignment vulnerability for years. Basically, Homakov exploited this vulnerability to add his public key to the Rails project on GitHub, which then meant that GitHub identified him as an administrator of the project. From here, he could effectively do anything, including deleting the entire project from the web; instead, he posted a fairly comical commit. GitHub summarily suspended Homakov, fixed the hole, and, after 'reviewing his activity,' he has been reinstated. Homakov could've gained administrative access to the master branch of any project on GitHub and deleted the history, committed junk, or closed or opened tracker tickets."
That's what you get when you allow Italians like this guy on America's internet. Don't say I didn't warn you.
The remedy is that we all need to be more proactive about patronizing Wisconsin cheese and California wine.
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Oh wait.. this is an open source community that understood what his intentions where and didn't have a knee jerk reaction. What I guess intelligence trumps mass panic and ignorance.
I think it's time to think about repository for strategic software, like Linux, GCC and so on.
Such a hacking can compromise a large part of the internet. Because someone can introduce backdoors, the nasty ones I mean, so deep to evade any check.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Fortunately, git is a distributed version control system, meaning that, usually, there is a copy of the sources and history information elsewhere.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
...as if millions of voices suddenly cried out from coffee shops in terror and were suddenly pwned. I fear something terrible, and totally predictable, has happened.
Just wait a few years, Ruby on fails will strike back!
This guy is very good example of what the real hacker is, and what they should be. Kudos man.
github paid accounts can have private repositories.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
This is Slashdot, the 99.9% doesn't come here
I find it funny that since this guy hacked github
See that's the problem. He didn't hack github. There is a wide open door in scaffolded rails apps. I am somewhat involved in rails development and even I know this, but "most people don't care". The problem in as few words as possible is a lack of input sanitation and/or more or less is the equivalent of allowing SQL injection. Makes for easy scaffolding and rollout. All you need to do is tell rails which attributes people should and should not be able to F with, which is trivially easy and impossible to default without turning rails into a fully cognitive AI system smarter than the programmers who refuse to declare which attributes are sensitive and which are not....
The phrases you don't know to google for are "mass assignment protection" and attr_accessible and attr_protected
http://enlightsolutions.com/articles/whats-new-in-edge-scoped-mass-assignment-in-rails-3-1
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
This is Slashdot, the 99.9% doesn't come here
Slashdot, home of the 0.1%.
Apparently GitHub's own admin isn't "pro" enough...
That is rather easy to answer. Git is a distributed version control system such that you can't make changes without it being noticed by the real authors. See ... http://git-scm.com/about ... for a better explanation. To get something malicious into the code you will need to get into the primary lieutenants source trees.
The master branch isn't on github, if there was any tampering a trivial check against Linus' master branch would see if there'd been any extra git commits. Nobody has to go through more than that. By the way, it's also impossible to insert an "old" commit in git because you'd have to reapply every subsequent patch and all the ids would change. But I guess that you're scaremongering and the mods are either clueless or feeding the troll.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Thankfully, no serious projects are hosted on GitHub.
Kill all hipsters.
That's idiocy on the part of the submitter. Linux is mirrored on github, and it was the authoritative repository for a while after kernel.org was hacked, but now it is not the authoritative repository and patches from there will not be pulled into the official tree unchecked.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Ruby on Rails - the perfect blend of poor performance (Ruby) and gaping holes (Rails).
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
OK, the blog is slashdot'd at the moment, but lets see if I have this right. Basically, you take an active record and just copy values from the POST data into it and then save it ... and this is the default behaviour? Do I have that right because, is so .... .... dear god, what were the ruby-on-rails people smoking when they thought that was a clever idea, its puts ROR on a level with PHP and its magic global variables. Note only that, but what were the github people smoking, the same? Using an insane facility is doubly insane.
Methinks a lot of people need to go and read some web design stuff and realise that active records (or models - django users take not) are not synonymous with the "Model" (business logic) in MVC.
This is NOTHING like lack of sanitizing or SQL injection.
Suppose your object has fields "name" and "is_special", and the web form only exposed "name" because "is_special" isn't supposed to be changed by regular users. The hacker who knows "is_special" exists, adds an "is_special" field to the web form on his browser and submits it. The developer probably uses "update_attributes" to process the form, and with default Rails settings it will commit the new "is_special" value to the database (properly sanitized, of course).
To prevent this, the developer may switch the settings to white-list, and provide a list of safe attributes for mass-assignment (update_attributes being one of the mass-assignment methods). Some people believe white-list mode should be the default settings. The hacker, probably being one of these people, found a great way to make his point that even seasoned Rails developers could use a push towards using white-lists.
This was brought up when kernel.org was compromised last year. The decentralized nature of git makes that really hard to sneak by, especially if you use the kind of process controls that the Linux kernel uses. Legitimate commits go through maintainers, and maintainers will definitely flip if they see code pulls into their repository that they didn't commit. Some deeper discussion about how you can't just sneak things into the past history is here: http://security.stackexchange.com/a/6771/836
SIG: HUP
At least the message was understood loud and clear... It took a couple of hours and a commit to Rails was made to change the default: https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/641a4f62405cc2765424320932902ed8076b5d38
Actually not, if it is a legit commit as Linus... That is the extent he can fake any account...
This is NOTHING like lack of sanitizing or SQL injection.
Yes, the act of processing user-supplied data in an unintended manner is exactly what "lack of sanitizing" means.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
He did disclose the publically.
The developers thought it was working as intended.
He hacked the site to show that they're morons.
They patched the issue.
I'm fairly certain the amount of PHP in your standard Ruby on Rails installation is relatively minor.
This isn't actually a hole in rails.. If you use mass assignment, you need to protect attributes you don't want assigned with attr_protected on your model.
:password => 'hacked'})
:password
If you don't want people to do this:
@user.update_attributes({:favorite_color => 'blue',
You need to do this:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
attr_protected
end