Hello John, After all the talks, i think it's clear that the problem is with fastpath, not with any other thing. Caches are not perfect. If you don't like it, you can fix it, or deactivate it. You choose what to do.
If you don't want to deactivate it, and have some C skills, I would recommend you to make the needed changes to fastpath code to enable it to use the kernel facilities of the operating system (in case you're using linux, then that'll be "epoll" system call; in FreeBSD case it's kqueue; etc.). For Linux, you'd only need to subscribe to the events on the files that are stored in fastpath, so if a "bad" event happens to them (they're deleted, modified, etc.), you can remove them from the fastpath cache. It's as easy as that. And you'll fix this bug with ns_returnfile, and with other functions that use fastpath and may be affected by this bug. I am not being sarcastic. I am just trying to get the best exit to this issue, so we all can get a good solution to this problem. Regards, Juan José - Juan José del Río | (+34) 616 512 340 | [EMAIL PROTECTED] Simple Option S.L. Tel: (+34) 951 930 122 Fax: (+34) 951 930 122 http://www.simpleoption.com On Tue, 2008-08-19 at 17:40 -0700, John Caruso wrote: > On Tuesday 04:57 PM 8/19/2008, Rusty Brooks wrote: > > > Personally I can't > >>imagine any persuasive argument that a caching mechanism that can easily > >>confuse /usr/local/private/var/rootpass and > >>/var/tmp/verisign/certs/webcert.txt should be enabled by default in a > >>web server. > > > >Oh, come on. Only if you're rapidly creating and deleting these files. > > Yes, I've explained the conditions several times. The point was that the > files can be in completely different locations in the filesystem with > completely different names, and may have secure contents. > > Again: this is not an academic point. This is an actual bug encountered > in actual code, resulting in data corruption (effectively) and possible > information leakage--and all because "ns_returnfile X" may not actually > return file X. I don't doubt that there are other people who are also at > risk due to this behavior of ns_returnfile/fastpath. > > If it's no big deal for you, great, but the security implications are > nonetheless serious. > > - John -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with the body of "SIGNOFF AOLSERVER" in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.