Affected versions of Git have a heap buffer overflow in the three-way merge code (xdiff), which an attacker can trigger through a repository they control.

When Git merges a file, it first adds up the size of the merged output, allocates a buffer of that size, and then writes the output into it. That total was kept in a 32-bit signed integer. The conflict-marker-size attribute, which can be set from a committed .gitattributes file, accepts any positive integer, and the markers are written several times for every conflict. A small file with a huge marker size and many separate conflicts can therefore push the total past 4 GiB, so the integer wraps to a small value and Git writes attacker-controlled merge output past the end of a buffer that is too small. At minimum this crashes Git, and because the overflow is large and its contents are largely attacker-controlled, worse heap corruption is possible.

Any command that does a textual three-way merge can trigger it, such as git-merge(1), git-rebase(1), git-cherry-pick(1), and git-merge-tree(1). The latter is most likely a target for Git forges, which might use git-merge-tree(1) on the server-side to check mergeability. When the server reads attributes from trees in the repository (for example through attr.tree or --attr-source), any user who can push branches and request that they be merged (for example by opening a pull or merge request) can trigger the overflow without anyone else doing anything, and the data they push is small because the oversized output only appears during the merge.

The problem has been patched by computing the size as sizet and checking every addition for overflow, so Git stops with an error instead of overflowing.

Servers that cannot upgrade right away can add

conflict-marker-size=7

to each repository's info/attributes as a workaround, which overrides any in-tree .gitattributes, or turn off server-side mergeability checks for untrusted repositories.