As someone who works with alot of log files, I'd like to chime in and
support Steven's end goal. Looking at a "Connection refused" error in
the middle of a log file that possibly extends to millions of lines is
near useless. In the era of cloud compute, diagnosing network issues is
sure to become a more common task.
While we may not be able to put the sensitive information in an
exception message, I think we could put it behind a (new?) system
property which might be able to log this information. Logs contain all
sorts of sensitive data. Take javax.net.debug=ssl output for example.
Regards,
Sean.
On 22/12/17 09:57, Chris Hegarty wrote:
On 22/12/17 01:27, David Holmes wrote:
cc'ing net-dev as that might be the more appropriate list.
On 22/12/2017 10:59 AM, Steven Schlansker wrote:
On Dec 21, 2017, at 4:35 PM, David Holmes <david.hol...@oracle.com>
wrote:
On 22/12/2017 10:29 AM, Steven Schlansker wrote:
On Dec 21, 2017, at 11:11 AM, Steven Schlansker
<stevenschlans...@gmail.com> wrote:
What if ConnectException included the attempted hostname / IP /
port SocketAddress?
java.net.ConnectException: Connection to
'foo.mycorp.com[10.x.x.x]:12345' refused
Much more useful! This could also be extended to various other
socket exceptions.
I believe there are concerns with too much information that can be
considered "sensitive" (like host names and IP addresses) appearing
in error messages due to them ending up in log files and bug reports.
Unfortunately that's exactly the information that is crucial to
someone trying to diagnose issues...
And to someone trying to discern private information about a network.
Could it be an opt-in policy? Perhaps by a system property?
Well, you don't know where a log file or exception will end up.
Most likely on stackoverflow.
The expectation is that such information should be added by layers
higher in the call chain, rather than the JDK libraries assuming it
is okay to do.
Agreed. It may be some work, but if the issue is significant
enough to the user then it may be worth their effort, as well
as affording the opportunity to opt-out at any particular
point in the code.
Currently the alternative I'm faced with is going through every
piece of user code and library that *might*
throw this exception and wrapping it to add this critical diagnostic
information. For an application that uses
java.net heavily, you can imagine how that is a tall task and
possibly even not realistically achievable...
(Is there a written policy regarding this somewhere, or is it up to
the personal feelings of the contributors?)
This is covered by the secure coding guidelines, under 'Confidential
information':
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/seccodeguide-139067.html#2
"Guideline 2-1 / CONFIDENTIAL-1: Purge sensitive information from
exceptions"
Exactly.
I know for a fact that we'd have to scrub this information from test
failures when putting the info into a bug report.
If net-dev folk can't expand further on this then I suggest filing a
CSR request so that the CSR group can consider it. But I think this
will be a no-go (I'm a member of the CSR group).
I have to agree with David here. I don't think that such a request
could be supported.
-Chris.
