Critical Git Vulnerabilities Discovered in Source Code Security Audit

A source code security audit has led to the discovery of several vulnerabilities in Git, the widely used distributed version control system.

The results of the security audit, sponsored by OSTIF and conducted by X41 and GitLab, were made public this week.

Git could be a tempting target for threat actors as a vulnerability affecting the system could be exploited to compromise developer systems or source code repositories.

The security holes found during the audit included two critical-, one high-, one medium- and four low-severity bugs, with the auditors also sharing more than two dozen informational notes. The critical vulnerabilities have been assigned the CVE identifiers CVE-2022-23521 and CVE-2022-41903.

Exploitation of the critical vulnerabilities can lead to remote code execution. Many of the other flaws can result in denial of service or information disclosure.

“The Git codebase shows several security issues and the sheer size of the codebase makes it challenging to address all potential instances of these issues,” the auditors said. “The use of safe wrappers can improve the overall security of the software as a short term strategy. As a long term improvement strategy, we recommend to alternate between time-boxed code base refactoring sprints and subsequent security reviews.”

The identified vulnerabilities have been patched. Additional details are available in a 96-page report (PDF).