Hi Ariel,

>> Oh, who had this great PermittedJavaMethods idea?
> 
> of course it wasn't our dear base development team, but some one afraid 
> of security-issues

Sigh.

No, the actual idea of the configuration item was mine :-\

The argueing is along those lines:

Somebody gives you an .odb file, which you open and connect to. This
crashs your machine [1], or executes some arbitrary static Java code,
which, you know, inseminates your dog or anything like this.

(Technically, this is because the HSQL engine upon connecting to a DB
executes the SQL commands contained in the DB's script file, and also
supports an SQL command to execute arbitrary static Java code.)

Since connecting to a database is not expected to do this kind of
things, it's a security issue.

So, we prohibit executing arbitrary static Java code.

To not lose the feature as such, we add a possibility to HSQL to declare
which code is considered safe. On OOo side, we add a configuration item
to control this.

Now when you install an extension which is carefully crafted to do all
kind of malicious things this way (it seemed to me Drew's mail on this
contained some kind of .... irony ... at least my irony detector
suggested so), then let's do it all those things.

Finally, you installed an extension from a not-trustworthy source, so
it's your fault, isn't it?

Ciao
Frank

PS: Yes, there's a certain portion of irony in this mail, too. If you
find it, you may keep it.

[1] In fact, there's a method in the non-published API part of Sun's
Java Distribution which, when invoked with "null", simply crashes the
complete process. The respective bug is closed as "This is an internal
API which is explicitly *not* to be used in your projects, so it's OK it
behaves like this.". Oh dear.

-- 
- Frank Schönheit, Software Engineer         [EMAIL PROTECTED] -
- Sun Microsystems                      http://www.sun.com/staroffice -
- OpenOffice.org Base                       http://dba.openoffice.org -
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