It poses a security risk to search for a git directory outside of the
directories owned by the current user.
For example, it is common e.g. in computer pools of educational
institutes to have a "scratch" space: a mounted disk with plenty of
space that is regularly swiped where any authenticated user can create
a directory to do their work. Merely navigating to such a space with a
Git-enabled `PS1` when there is a maliciously-crafted `/scratch/.git/`
can lead to a compromised account.
The same holds true in multi-user setups running Windows, as `C:\` is
writable to every authenticated user by default.
To plug this vulnerability, we stop Git from accepting top-level
directories owned by someone other than the current user. We avoid
looking at the ownership of each and every directories between the
current and the top-level one (if there are any between) to avoid
introducing a performance bottleneck.
This new default behavior is obviously incompatible with the concept of
shared repositories, where we expect the top-level directory to be owned
by only one of its legitimate users. To re-enable that use case, we add
support for adding exceptions from the new default behavior via the
config setting `safe.directory`.
The `safe.directory` config setting is only respected in the system and
global configs, not from repository configs or via the command-line, and
can have multiple values to allow for multiple shared repositories.
We are particularly careful to provide a helpful message to any user
trying to use a shared repository.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
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