Hi Roger,

On 07/20/2016 04:44 PM, Roger Riggs wrote:

- What is the purpose of the UNDECIDED return? I suspect it is meant to be used in some filter implementation that delegates the validation to some "parent" filter and respects its decision unless it is UNDECIDED in which case it decides (or does not) on its own. Should such strategy be mentioned in the docs to encourage inter-operable filter implementations?
Yes, some simple filters might be for purposes of black-listing or white-listing. The pattern based filters, as produced by ObjectInputFilter.createFilter(patterns), can simply represent white or black listing, but if none of the patterns match, it can only report UNDECIDED.

A custom filter, should check if there is a process-wide filter configured and invoke it first. Returning its status unless it is UNDECIDED and in that case use its own logic to determine the status.

Definitely worthy of an @apiNote in ObjectInputFilter.

Shoud Config.createFilter(pattern) then have an overload that allows specifying a "parent" filter in addition to the "pattern" ?



- The call-back is invoked after the type of the object and possible array length is read from stream but before the object's state is read. Suppose that the object that is about to be read is either Externalizable object or an object with a readObject() method(s) that consume block data from the stream. This block data can be large. Should there be a call-back to "announce" the block data too? (for example, when the 'clazz' is null and the 'size' is 0, the call-back reports a back-reference to a previously read object, but when the 'clazz' is null and the 'size' > 0, it announces the 'size' bytes of block data. Does this make sense?)
Interesting case, I'll take another look at that. Since block data records are <= 1024, a filter might not have enough information to make an informed decision. Those bytes would show up in
the stream bytes but not until the next object is read.

...which could be to late. If the filter is to be also used as a defense against forged streams that try to provoke DOS by triggering frequent GCs and OutOfMemoryError(s), then such call-back that announces each block data record could help achieve that.

Regards, Peter

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