Thread

1. OkayPhysicist · 1790877065 · focus · HN ↗

   Can someone more cyber-pilled than me explain what the actual risk with Git hashes being susceptible to collision attacks is? Obviously accidental collisions are problematic, but to my understanding the probability of that is still approximately zero.

   Best I can tell, all a forced collision would do is let someone who already has control of a repo modify the history in a far from plausibly deniable way. Which in practical terms, they already could do simply by replacing the whole thing, because who's out here using git hashes as a security tool? Every pinning I've ever seen has been to tags (which can be modified at will), or hashes of the actual payload (which doesn't need to be the same as what git uses).

   1. Palomides · 1790877379 · focus · HN ↗

      I see commit hashes used all the time, like in yocto recipes for example

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