GitHub Security Advisory: GHSA-2frx-2596-x5r6
Package: gix-ref (RUST)
Severity: MODERATE (CVSS 6.8)
CWE: CWE-328: Use of Weak Hash
Vulnerable versions: < 0.51.0
Patched in: 0.51.0

Summary: gitoxide does not detect SHA-1 collision attacks

Details:
### Summary
gitoxide uses SHA-1 hash implementations without any collision detection, leaving it vulnerable to hash collision attacks.

### Details
gitoxide uses the `sha1_smol` or `sha1` crate, both of which implement standard SHA-1 without any mitigations for collision attacks. This means that two distinct Git objects with colliding SHA-1 hashes would break the Git object model and integrity checks when used with gitoxide.

The SHA-1 function is considered cryptographically insecure. However, in the wake of the SHAttered attacks, this issue was mitigated in Git 2.13.0 in 2017 by using the [sha1collisiondetection](https://github.com/crmarcstevens/sha1collisiondetection) algorithm by default and producing an error when known SHA-1 collisions are detected. Git is in the process of migrating to using SHA-256 for object hashes, but this has not been rolled out widely yet and gitoxide does not support SHA-256 object hashes.

### PoC
The following program demonstrates the problem, using the two [SHAttered PDFs](https://shattered.io/):

```rust
use sha1_checked::{CollisionResult, Digest};

fn sha1_oid_of_file(filename: &str) -> gix::ObjectId {
    let mut hasher = gix::features::hash::hasher(gix::hash::Kind::Sha1);
    hasher.update(&std::fs::read(filename).unwrap());
    gix::ObjectId::Sha1(hasher.digest())
}

fn sha1dc_oid_of_file(filename: &str) -> Result<gix::ObjectId, String> {
    // Matches Git’s behaviour.
    let mut hasher = sha1_checked::Builder::default().safe_hash(false).build();
    hasher.update(&std::fs::read(filename).unwrap());
    match hasher.try_finalize() {
        CollisionResult::Ok(digest) => Ok(gix::ObjectId::Sha1(digest.into())),
        CollisionResult::Mitigated(_) => unreachable!(),
        CollisionResult::Collision(digest) => Err(format!(
            "Collision attack: {}",
            gix::ObjectId::Sha1(digest.into()).to_hex()
        )),
    }
}

fn main() {
    dbg!(sha1_oid_of_file("shattered-1.pdf"));
    dbg!(sha1_oid_of_file("shattered-2.pdf"));
    dbg!(sha1dc_oid_of_file("shattered-1.pdf"));
    dbg!(sha1dc_oid_of_file("shattered-2.pdf"));
}
```

The output is as follows:

```
[src/main.rs:24:5] sha1_oid_of_file("shattered-1.pdf") = Sha1(38762cf7f55934b34d179ae6a4c80cadccbb7f0a)
[src/main.rs:25:5] sha1_oid_of_file("shattered-2.pdf") = Sha1(38762cf7f55934b34d179ae6a4c80cadccbb7f0a)
[src/main.rs:26:5] sha1dc_oid_of_file("shattered-1.pdf") = Err(
    "Collision attack: 38762cf7f55934b34d179ae6a4c80cadccbb7f0a",
)
[src/main.rs:27:5] sha1dc_oid_of_file("shattered-2.pdf") = Err(
    "Collision attack: 38762cf7f55934b34d179ae6a4c80cadccbb7f0a",
)
```

The latter behaviour matches Git.

Since the SHAttered PDFs are not in a valid format for Git objects, a direct proof‐of‐concept using higher‐level APIs cannot be immediately demonstrated without significant computational resources.

### Impact
An attacker with the ability to mount a collision attack on SHA-1 like the [SHAttered](https://shattered.io/) or [SHA-1 is a Sha