I do not see an obvious approach to solve this issue except documenting the potential security problem in the manual. It exists in all R-related applications, including R packages. I have seen people collecting keywords like system() and file.remove(), but that is apparently far from a perfect solution. Education is probably the only way...
Regards, Yihui -- Yihui Xie <xieyi...@gmail.com> Phone: 515-294-2465 Web: http://yihui.name Department of Statistics, Iowa State University 2215 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 8:51 PM, Scott Kostyshak <skost...@lyx.org> wrote: > I do not see knitr and Sweave security discussed anywhere. The > Customization guide has 5 paragraphs on security regarding external > templates. > > For example, someone could post a .lyx file asking for help that > contains malicious code. I don't always check the list of modules that > a document has and sometimes it might be hard to go through the entire > file looking at the chunks of code (which might not stand out since > they can be collapsed) before compiling. Using R's "system" command, > one can run arbitrary commands, downloading/uploading or deleting > information. > > In the external template support, measures are taken to restrict the > access that the user has to the shell. > > I do not see any options that Rscript can accept to provide more security. > > Any thoughts as far as improving security, warning the user, or documentation? > > Thanks, > > Scott
