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Suppose that you are, say, a security researcher, running purely static analysis tools on the code from every git repo that you can crawl, specifically looking
by lazaroclapp 8y ago
Suppose that you are, say, a security researcher, running purely static analysis tools on the code from every git repo that you can crawl, specifically looking for malware or common bugs without running the code (simple example: you are grep-ing for AWS keys and other secrets that should never be committed to a repo). This would be unexpected and very dangerous behavior in that setting.
Sure, in theory, "unexpected and dangerous behavior" is par the course for security research and you isolate even data that you don't intend to execute if you suspect it is malicious. But, in practice, this is an easy mistake to make.
As another example, consider an automatic git mirror, or whatever the internal GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket infra might do to move repos around, without intending to execute the code.
- mclehman 8y agoThank you for posting this. I found myself mostly agreeing with the user you replied to, even though I myself am crawling and cloning a large number of git repos to do some static analysis work on them. That was a niche attack vector that I'm clearly exposed to, and somehow I still wasn't seeing it.