• Nick Thomas's avatar
    Make cross-repository comparisons happen in the source repository · 158bcb0a
    Nick Thomas authored
    Prior to this commit, if we wanted to compare changes between two
    branches in different repositories - for instance, creating an MR from
    a fork child to a fork parent - the commits for the fork child end up
    in the fork parent's repository. Even if no MR is created, the commits
    remain accessible until a garbage collection run is completed.
    
    Since GitLab acts as a SHA oracle, these commits can be found by anyone
    with access to the target project, which has a security impact.
    
    Forks are not allowed to be more visible than their parents, but they
    are allowed to be less visible, so putting their commits into the fork
    parent is a bad idea.
    
    Instead, we can do the comparison in the fork child's repository; the
    commit for the target branch can be fetched with the same mechanism we
    use for child -> parent fetches at the moment. This prevents disclosure
    in the most common case.
    
    This should also have a positive performance impact - a fork child will
    already have the commit from the fork parent far more often than the
    fork parent, so we'll need to do fetches less often.
    
    Even though this is a security fix, I pulled the code for the affected
    method out into a separate class to make the changes clearer. Roughly
    the same number of lines are removed or altered; a few more are added,
    but I think the increased clarity is worthwhile in this case.
    158bcb0a
security-reverse-polarity-of-branch-compare.yml 115 Bytes