Security issues when running gerrit patches on jenkins

[Karsten 'quaid' Wade]

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On 07/18/2012 06:20 AM, Dan Kenigsberg wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 07:05:16AM -0400, Eyal Edri wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Following last infra meeting, i want to open for discussion the
>> security issues that may arise if we allow Jenkins to run jobs
>> (i.e any code) with every gerrit patch.
>> 
>> The problem:
>> 
>> In theory, any user that is registered to gerrit might send a
>> patch to any ovirt project. That code might contain malicious
>> code, malware, harmfull or just not-related ovirt code that he
>> wants to use our resources for it. Even though we use limited
>> sudo on hosts, we can't be sure an exploit will be used against
>> one of the jenkins slaves.
>> 
>> 
>> The proposed solutions:
>> 
>> - black-listing authors (published on ovirt.org?) - white-listing
>> authors (published on ovirt.org?) - auto approve patch via
>> comparing to lastest commits - check if author recent patches
>> were approved in the past?
>> 
>> adding dan since he raised this issue when we wanted to add vdsm
>> gerrit tests.
> 
> In my opinion, we can trust anyone who has already contributed code
> to the relevant project. We can even say: someone who contributed
> more than 3 commits over a month ago.

This seems like a reasonable approach. Trust people first, and it's
fine to have a method to untrust people if the need arises. That
shouldn't surprise or disappoint anyone - it's just simple sanity.

The alternatives are to build untrust in to the process from the
start, which becomes a barrier to getting things done, and perpetuates
a culture of untrust.

I just remind myself, if someone is going to worm their way in to our
trust to run malicious code on our Jenkins instances, there is so much
more damage they can do with that trust.

Trust is like fertilizer, water, and sunshine in the garden - it makes
amazing things grow. :)

- - Karsten
- -- 
Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Analyst - Community Growth
http://TheOpenSourceWay.org  .^\  http://community.redhat.com
@quaid (identi.ca/twitter/IRC)  \v'  gpg: AD0E0C41


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