parse_commit(): handle broken whitespace-only timestamp

The comment in parse_commit_date() claims that parse_timestamp() will
not walk past the end of the buffer we've been given, since it will hit
the newline at "eol" and stop. This is usually true, when dateptr
contains actual numbers to parse. But with a line like:

   committer name <email>   \n

with just whitespace, and no numbers, parse_timestamp() will consume
that newline as part of the leading whitespace, and we may walk past our
"tail" pointer (which itself is set from the "size" parameter passed in
to parse_commit_buffer()).

In practice this can't cause us to walk off the end of an array, because
we always add an extra NUL byte to the end of objects we load from disk
(as a defense against exactly this kind of bug). However, you can see
the behavior in action when "committer" is the final header (which it
usually is, unless there's an encoding) and the subject line can be
parsed as an integer. We walk right past the newline on the committer
line, as well as the "\n\n" separator, and mistake the subject for the
timestamp.

We can solve this by trimming the whitespace ourselves, making sure that
it has some non-whitespace to parse. Note that we need to be a bit
careful about the definition of "whitespace" here, as our isspace()
doesn't match exotic characters like vertical tab or formfeed. We can
work around that by checking for an actual number (see the in-code
comment). This is slightly more restrictive than the current code, but
in practice the results are either the same (we reject "foo" as "0", but
so would parse_timestamp()) or extremely unlikely even for broken
commits (parse_timestamp() would allow "\v123" as "123", but we'll now
make it "0").

I did also allow "-" here, which may be controversial, as we don't
currently support negative timestamps. My reasoning was two-fold. One,
the design of parse_timestamp() is such that we should be able to easily
switch it to handling signed values, and this otherwise creates a
hard-to-find gotcha that anybody doing that work would get tripped up
on. And two, the status quo is that we currently parse them, though the
result of course ends up as a very large unsigned value (which is likely
to just get clamped to "0" for display anyway, since our date routines
can't handle it).

The new test checks the commit parser (via "--until") for both vanilla
spaces and the vertical-tab case. I also added a test to check these
against the pretty-print formatter, which uses split_ident_line().  It's
not subject to the same bug, because it already insists that there be
one or more digits in the timestamp.

Helped-by: Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 26 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/commit.c b/commit.c
index a1bc4bd8b9..a54b0a0df0 100644
--- a/commit.c
+++ b/commit.c
@@ -116,10 +116,34 @@ static timestamp_t parse_commit_date(const char *buf, const char *tail)
 	dateptr = eol;
 	while (dateptr > buf && dateptr[-1] != '>')
 		dateptr--;
-	if (dateptr == buf || dateptr == eol)
+	if (dateptr == buf)
 		return 0;
 
-	/* dateptr < eol && *eol == '\n', so parsing will stop at eol */
+	/*
+	 * Trim leading whitespace, but make sure we have at least one
+	 * non-whitespace character, as parse_timestamp() will otherwise walk
+	 * right past the newline we found in "eol" when skipping whitespace
+	 * itself.
+	 *
+	 * In theory it would be sufficient to allow any character not matched
+	 * by isspace(), but there's a catch: our isspace() does not
+	 * necessarily match the behavior of parse_timestamp(), as the latter
+	 * is implemented by system routines which match more exotic control
+	 * codes, or even locale-dependent sequences.
+	 *
+	 * Since we expect the timestamp to be a number, we can check for that.
+	 * Anything else (e.g., a non-numeric token like "foo") would just
+	 * cause parse_timestamp() to return 0 anyway.
+	 */
+	while (dateptr < eol && isspace(*dateptr))
+		dateptr++;
+	if (!isdigit(*dateptr) && *dateptr != '-')
+		return 0;
+
+	/*
+	 * We know there is at least one digit (or dash), so we'll begin
+	 * parsing there and stop at worst case at eol.
+	 */
 	return parse_timestamp(dateptr, NULL, 10);
 }