Good note, and good callout, we should always call out these things.
But yes if you're self hosting and you both have a public facing instance and allow open registration, you are a much much braver person than I.
I'm not allowing random people hosting their git repos on mine but it's public and they can fork my own stuff on it in theoretically upload some bullshit.
Got curious and lurked your profile. You might want to update your about from Lemmy to PieFed 🙂
Oh, there is still some Lemmy link somewhere? I'm trying to find it but couldn't, where did you see it?
Oh actually it’s on your homepage (jeena.net) in the About section on the left side
Aah, there it was, thanks! Fixed.
I live in South Korea, brew beer
Way off topic, but I use to be a prolific brewer of beer. In fact the rig that I built can turn 50 gallons of wort in about 3 hours and it's ready to pitch the yeast in. Brewing beer is a very fascinating process. I also made meads, wines, and have dabbled in sake, tho I wouldn't say my sake was ready for prime time. LOL And you are a musician. I already like you and I don't even know you. LOL
Haha, yeah, although some of my hobbies slowed down a lot since I got a family. Small children really take up a lot of time.
Today for example the 2.5 years old ate a lot of potato's and schnitzel without really chewing. Then he drank a ton of milk after dinner. While his big sister already went to bed at 21:30 he was still jumping on the bed at 22:00 und suddenly he puked out everything on the bed. So we had to clean RhE bed, the floor, him and us, was everything, shower etc.
Now it's 23:00 and he is still excited about it and is singing in the freshly made bed instead of sleeping.
Actually we wanted to watch a episode of some TV series bit now it's way too late for this.
Small children really take up a lot of time.
Yeah but that's awesome
Any time you have a server willing to process random data uploaded from randos, just expect it to be compromised eventually and prepare for the eventuality by isolating it, backing it up religiously, and setting up good monitoring of some sort. Doesnt matter if its a forge, a wiki, or like nextcloud or whatever. It will happen.
To anyone afraid of the above conclusion, a dedicated $5 VPS with automatic snapshots get you a long way.
if the server is compromised, all the data it stores is at risk of getting drleted or modified. so I don't think a VPS really solves the problem.
Here are the steps:
- The attacker creates a standard Git repository.
- They commit a single symbolic link pointing to a sensitive target.
- Using the PutContents API, they write data to the symlink. The system follows the link and overwrites the target file outside the repository.
- By overwriting .git/config (specifically the sshCommand), the attacker can force the system to execute arbitrary commands--
amazing.
Especially since any version of Git from the last view years has a passionate hatred of symlinks for this reason, which is a bit annoying if you've a legit usecase. They're either very out-of-date, or have done some very foolish customisation...
I think the ZIP standard has something similar and it causes similar problems.
It's because of the old notion of "be generous in what you accept and strict in what you send". I think the error is something about adding more parent directories so that part of your zip file will be extracted above the selected directory. Not all implementations of zip support this "feature".
There are also all kinds of stupid ancient features in tar and zip from a time when hard drives were measured in megabytes or less. The latest episode of the open source security podcast talks about it.
We also have COW filesystems now. If you need large datasets in different places, used by different projects, etc, just copy them and use BTRFS or ZFS or whatever. It wont take any space and be safer. Git also has multiple ways of connecting external data artifacts. Git should by default reject symlinks.
Git itself (Or any other VCS for that matter) really should treat symlinks as special, similar as to how btrfs stores everything as "reflinks" internally. They be stored as special references to other tracked objects (so it'd be impossible to commit a symlink that pointed at anything other than a checked-in file, and ensure they always match), and git can materialise them as needed.
This is sadly not easily generalizable, since a lot of people still use legacy operating systems with filesystems like NTFS, which as far as I know is not COW.
If i remember correctly on my gitea (now forgejo) the default is open registration which really shouldn't be the case for projects that are targeted towards self hosters.
My inital install was a long time ago so I don't remember for sure
Yeah in my project open registration is behind an option called yes_i_am_very_very_sure_i_want_an_open_registration_server_prone_to_abuse lol
Honestly, this is always more effective than a comment in the config because it can get removed. All it would take is a popular guide having the config with that option on and the comment gone.
I'm a current gitea user.. should I be moving to forgejo?
Yes, even without this current news.
Thanks! I'll add it to the todo list.
I just did it not long a ago. Gittea -> Forgejo10 -> Forgejo11 LTS, in Docker. Surprisingly quick, painless and smooth.
(My only issue was not Forgejo, but MySQL. Because the hardware is ancient and Docker compose pulled down a new version of mysql8 at the same time as pulling forgejo. New version of mysql8 didnt support my CPU architecture. Easy fix was to change the label mysql8oraclelinux7 in Docker compose and pull that image. There is a issue with solutions in the MySQL Docker GitHub repo)
Doesn't Forgejo support SQLite as a backend?
Yes, although MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL are the more robust options.
If MySQL is more robust than SQLite of all things, something is going seriously wrong.
Then again, it's 2025. I no longer bet on what to expect from reality. Next someone points me to a mail indicating linux kernel will move its bookkeeping to MongoDB.
Depends how they define robust. MySQL has a myriad of features SLQite doesn't have and won't ever have. If they mean something like user configuration then SQLite is just out by default.
(Coming from a SQLite fan.)
To be honest I don't remember why I set up gitea with MySQL instead of sqlite (or MariaDB), its quite a few years ago. And sqlite would probably be fine for my single-user instance
Doesn't seem like Gitea has that issue, and just keep registrations disabled if possible and if your projects allow, avoid symlinking.
Reading between the lines I feel like when you say “Targeted towards self hosters” what you mean is “John Q Hobbyist who doesn’t know any better”
And in response to that I would contend that Gitea is not actually targeted at those folks, though they obviously use it. Gitea is FOSS but it’s still “targeted” at professionals.
This absolutely. Anyone who actually wants open registration will be configuring their own SSO or whatever backend. The default should be safe for testing and/or hobbyists.
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