Git Hash Chain Malleability
This work reveals a fundamental flaw in the security model of Git commit signing, impacting any system that relies on commit hashes as content-addressable identifiers.
The paper demonstrates that Git commit hashes are not immutable: an attacker without the signing key can produce a second distinct commit with the same content and a valid signature, differing only in hash, by exploiting malleability in ECDSA, OpenPGP, and S/MIME. This breaks the assumption that commit hashes uniquely identify signed content, affecting systems like Nixpkgs and GitHub Actions.
Git commit signing is widely entrusted to serve as evidence that a commit hash uniquely and immutably identifies a specific piece of signed content. We show this invariant does not hold. Given any signed commit, an attacker without access to the signing key, and without breaking SHA2 can produce a second, distinct commit with an identical tree, identical metadata, a valid signature, and a ``Verified'' badge from a Git Forge such as Github, differing only in its commit hash. The modified commit cascades to modify the values of all the subsequent, dependent commit hashes, hence we introduce the terminology ``hash chain malleability'' to describe this phenomenon. The malleability in signed Git hashes is feasible due to the inherent malleability present in many of the data representations that make up a commit. In this paper we show three such malleation routes: (i) algebraic inversion s -> n-s for ECDSA; (ii) structural insertion of an unhashed OpenPGP subpacket (RFC4880 5.2.3) for RSA and EdDSA; and (iii) non-canonical DER length re-encoding (X.690 10.1) inside the CMS envelope for S/MIME. Algebraic inversion for ECDSA signatures and subpacket insertion were found to pass local verification (git verify-commit), and all three methods yield a persistent, independent ``Verified'' record on Github. We discuss the consequences of Git hash chain malleation for hash-based commit blocking, dependency pinning (Nixpkgs, Go modules, Github Actions), and reproducible-build systems that treat the commit hash as a content-addressable primary key, and we provide proof-of-concept tooling that automates all three routes.