Matt Sergeant writes: > There's a huge difference in what they are trying to achieve though. > POE doesn't open any files and it doesn't write any files to disk. None > of it is written in C (yet), so unless there's a buffer overrun or type > mismatch bug in perl you can exploit, you're not going to get in that > way.
I agree that Perl is a "safe" language (independent of taint, which adds safety). Unfortunately, there has been a history of insecure Perl programs (formail.pl, I think being the most famous). This may be a consequence of "bad programming", but you have to look at the average if you are selecting a system without reviewing every line of code, i.e., performing a security audit. I trust Linux more than Apache, for example, because Linux is not only older, but was built using an interface design which is 30 years old and has been allowed to evolve. > I'm not honestly suggesting it's bug free, but I fail to see how a bug > in POE would give you access to the system. Use of a user string incorrectly in a "system" or "open" might do it. Also, an incorrect chown, chmod, umask, etc. > Now user code written on top of POE (or Apache) is another matter > altogether. :) Rob
