Announcing security_release_practice

2013-03-08

Security is hard. One of the skills any OSS maintainer needs is how to do releases, and security releases are a special kind of release that needs special git-fu to make it work.

I’ve created a repository so that you can practice this particular skill. It’s called ‘security_release_practice’.

The problem

‘security_release_practice’ provides a binary, omg_insecure, which has a security issue. Basically, the super_secure_calculation method converts user input to a symbol. Since Ruby does not garbage collect symbols, the longer you run omg_insecure, the more memory it will use, until your computer runs out of memory and the box grinds to a halt. Seems bad.

So, just fix super_secure_calculation and release, right? Well, here’s the problem: the last release of security_release_practice was 1.0.0. Since then, we’ve had a new feature, and a backwards incompatible change with super_secure_calculation. You can see the two commits here.

This is a problem: if we fix the issue and release, people who are relying on the + 5 behavior can’t upgrade: they’ll now be getting + 6. Also, the new feature (another_new_calculation) may have conflicts or weirdness with their code. That’s bad! So what we really want is a relase that’s exactly the same as 1.0.0, but with the security fix applied.

Let’s give that a shot.

The answer

If you think you’re good with git, you can try this out right now. If you’ve done it correctly, you should end up with the following:

A 1-0-stable branch
That branch should contain a new commit that fixes the issue
That branch should contain a new tag, v1.0.1 that fixes the issue
Master should have a backported version of the commit in #2.

The repository as it exists has all of this stuff, so check your work against it!

Practice!

If you don’t know how to do this, or you get stuck, you’ve come to the right place! Here’s what you need to do:

First, some setup work. Fork the repository and clone it down. Or, just clone mine, whatever:

$ git clone https://github.com/steveklabink/security_release_practice
$ cd security_release_practice

Next, since this repository has the backported fix involved, you need to remove that commit:

$ git reset --hard HEAD~1

This basically backs our branch out by one commit. Now we’re ready to go.

The first thing in actually doing the work is to check out the tag that we last released from. In our case, that tag is v1.0.0. So let’s do that now:

$ git checkout v1.0.0

git will give you a message:

Note: checking out 'v1.0.0'.

You are in 'detached HEAD' state. You can look around, make experimental
changes and commit them, and you can discard any commits you make in this
state without impacting any branches by performing another checkout.

If you want to create a new branch to retain commits you create, you may
do so (now or later) by using -b with the checkout command again. Example:

  git checkout -b new_branch_name

HEAD is now at 47a8bfb... Initial release.

We want to take git’s advice: let’s make a new branch. Since it’s going to be all our fixes for 1.0.x, let’s call it 1-0-stable:

git checkout -b 1-0-stable

Now we have our stable branch. Awesome! Master is the work that will go into 1.1.x, and this branch will be for 1.0.x.

Next, we need to fix our bug. You need to remove this one line:

--- a/lib/security_release_practice.rb+++ b/lib/security_release_practice.rb@@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ require "security_release_practice/version" module SecurityReleasePractice   def super_secure_calculation(input)-     input.to_sym     input.to_i + 5   end   def another_new_calculation(input)

We don’t even use that symbol, what a waste! Commit this, with a descriptive message. You can find mine here. Note the first few characters of the hash: mine is 168d5f756221.

Next, we need to release. Go ahead and increment the version number in lib/security_release_practice/version.rb, commit that, and then try rake install. Everything should work. Great! If you were actually releasing this gem, you’d be running rake release instead, but it’s my gem, not yours. ????

Okay, now we’ve released a version with our fix, but master still has a vulnerability: we need to port the fix. So let’s go back to master:

$ git checkout master

And then cherry-pick our fix over:

$ git cherry-pick 168d5f756221

There will be a conflict. The diff is a little weird, such is life. Go ahead and fix the conflict, then commit:

$ git commit

And you’re done!

Other considerations

If we had a CHANGELOG, we’d need to udpate that as appropriate, including creating new sections for our 1.0.1 release.

Sometimes it’s easier to fix things on master first, then backport to the new branch. I prefer to do it the way I showed here.

You should probably try to get as many people to know that you’ve fixed the bug. Tweet, blog, rabble-rouse, and possibly post to the ruby-security-ann mailing list, which was created to help Rubyists know about security releases of their gems.

If your gem is really widely used, you may want to actually register a CVE. You can find information on this process here. I made one here.