On 9/3/07, Tom Lane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Gregory Stark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > "Tom Lane" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> I'm not convinced that . is issue-free. On most if not all versions of > >> Unix, > >> you are allowed to open a directory as a file and read the filenames it > >> contains. While I don't say it'd be easy to manage that through > >> tsearch, there's at least a potential for discovering the filenames > >> present in . and .. --- how much do we care about that? > > > Actually I don't think that's true any more, most file systems on most > > Unixen > > do not allow it. However it appears it's still the case for Solaris so it's > > still a good point. > > Actually, now that I've woken up a bit more, it is not a problem as > long as the tsearch code always appends some kind of file extension > to what the user gives, such as ".dict". It'll be impossible to name > "." or ".." with that addition.
I don't know what you're discussing well enough to know if this is relevant, but what you just said is not always true. If there is any way to pass arbitrary binary data into your function call, then someone can pass in a string with nul in it. When that hits the OS API, your appended .dict won't be seen as part of the filename. (This is a common security oversight when calling C APIs from higher-level languages such as Perl. See http://artofhacking.com/files/phrack/phrack55/P55-07.TXT for more.) [...] Cheers, Ben ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly
