builtin/clone: stop resolving symlinks when copying files

When a user performs a local clone without `--no-local`, then we end up
copying the source repository into the target repository directly. To
optimize this even further, we try to hardlink files into place instead
of copying data over, which helps both disk usage and speed.

There is an important edge case in this context though, namely when we
try to hardlink symlinks from the source repository into the target
repository. Depending on both platform and filesystem the resulting
behaviour here can be different:

  - On macOS and NetBSD, calling link(3P) with a symlink target creates
    a hardlink to the file pointed to by the symlink.

  - On Linux, calling link(3P) instead creates a hardlink to the symlink
    itself.

To unify this behaviour, 36596fd (clone: better handle symlinked
files at .git/objects/, 2019-07-10) introduced logic to resolve symlinks
before we try to link(3P) files. Consequently, the new behaviour was to
always create a hard link to the target of the symlink on all platforms.

Eventually though, we figured out that following symlinks like this can
cause havoc when performing a local clone of a malicious repository,
which resulted in CVE-2022-39253. This issue was fixed via 6f054f9
(builtin/clone.c: disallow `--local` clones with symlinks, 2022-07-28),
by refusing symlinks in the source repository.

But even though we now shouldn't ever link symlinks anymore, the code
that resolves symlinks still exists. In the best case the code does not
end up doing anything because there are no symlinks anymore. In the
worst case though this can be abused by an adversary that rewrites the
source file after it has been checked not to be a symlink such that it
actually is a symlink when we call link(3P). Thus, it is still possible
to recreate CVE-2022-39253 due to this time-of-check-time-of-use bug.

Remove the call to `realpath()`. This doesn't yet address the actual
vulnerability, which will be handled in a subsequent commit.

Reported-by: Apple Product Security <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <[email protected]>

Author: pks-t

builtin/clone.c

@@ -320,7 +320,6 @@ static void copy_or_link_directory(struct strbuf *src, struct strbuf *dest,
 	int src_len, dest_len;
 	struct dir_iterator *iter;
 	int iter_status;
-	struct strbuf realpath = STRBUF_INIT;
 
 	mkdir_if_missing(dest->buf, 0777);
 
@@ -358,8 +357,7 @@ static void copy_or_link_directory(struct strbuf *src, struct strbuf *dest,
 		if (unlink(dest->buf) && errno != ENOENT)
 			die_errno(_("failed to unlink '%s'"), dest->buf);
 		if (!option_no_hardlinks) {
-			strbuf_realpath(&realpath, src->buf, 1);
-			if (!link(realpath.buf, dest->buf))
+			if (!link(src->buf, dest->buf))
 				continue;
 			if (option_local > 0)
 				die_errno(_("failed to create link '%s'"), dest->buf);
@@ -373,8 +371,6 @@ static void copy_or_link_directory(struct strbuf *src, struct strbuf *dest,
 		strbuf_setlen(src, src_len);
 		die(_("failed to iterate over '%s'"), src->buf);
 	}
-
-	strbuf_release(&realpath);
 }
 
 static void clone_local(const char *src_repo, const char *dest_repo)