Jeff King authored Oct 19, 2017 and Junio C Hamano committed Oct 21, 2017

The refs_resolve_ref_unsafe() function may return NULL even
with a REF_ISSYMREF flag if a symref points to a broken ref.
As a result, it's possible for find_shared_symref() to
segfault when it passes NULL to strcmp().

This is hard to trigger for most code paths. We typically
pass HEAD to the function as the symref to resolve, and
programs like "git branch" will bail much earlier if HEAD
isn't valid.

I did manage to trigger it through one very obscure
sequence:

  # You have multiple notes refs which conflict.
  git notes add -m base
  git notes --ref refs/notes/foo add -m foo

  # There's left-over cruft in NOTES_MERGE_REF that
  # makes it a broken symref (in this case we point
  # to a syntactically invalid ref).
  echo "ref: refs/heads/master.lock" >.git/NOTES_MERGE_REF

  # You try to merge the notes. We read the broken value in
  # order to complain that another notes-merge is
  # in-progress, but we segfault in find_shared_symref().
  git notes merge refs/notes/foo

This is obviously silly and almost certainly impossible to
trigger accidentally, but it does show that the bug is
triggerable from at least one code path. In addition, it
would trigger if we saw a transient filesystem error when
resolving the pointed-to ref.

We can fix this by treating NULL the same as a non-matching
symref. Arguably we'd prefer to know if a symref points to
"refs/heads/foo", but "refs/heads/foo" is broken. But
refs_resolve_ref_unsafe() isn't capable of giving us that
information, so this is the best we can do.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>