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authorJoey Hess <joey@kodama.kitenet.net>2008-01-30 15:24:39 -0500
committerJoey Hess <joey@kodama.kitenet.net>2008-01-30 16:30:24 -0500
commit35af86096bfba6c2c11a4213824b80e76a95eef1 (patch)
tree2ae49a2d747beda4949e196dc6fe6eda2515b422
parent2952288db44d5cdea9e19fd2254ab2fdff1c6352 (diff)
copying an intersting bit from an email I'm writing
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+Copied from an email I sent --[[Joey]]
+
+> Apart from restricting escape characters and characters with special
+> meanings to the filesystem (such as '/') or the version control system
+> (which may not cope with \n), why limit filenames at all?
+
+Suppose that git-add and git-commit a shell scripts:
+
+ #!/bin/sh
+ /opt/git/git commit $1
+
+ #!/bin/sh
+ /opt/git/git add $1
+
+Ok, that's crappy code, but git add and commit are only run by a trusted
+user at the command line, so it's hardly a security hole. (And frankly,
+I'm not all too impressed with the real shell code I've seen in git-*
+..)
+
+But there's no security problem until ikiwiki calls it on a filename
+that a web user made up. Now, suppose that ikiwiki decided to allow
+spaces in filenames. Nothing else new, just spaces. Of course, the above
+bad code will fail to add and commit such files.
+
+But it won't just fail, it can even expose private data. Suppose that $1
+is "foo.mdwn .ikiwiki/userdb foo.mdwn". Then the userdb, with its
+passwords and emails is committed, along with foo.mdwn.
+
+Moral: ikiwiki interfaces with code that was not necessarily written for the
+security context that ikiwiki runs in. Even the most innocuous filenames can do
+very unexpected things if you let the shell get ahold of them. Ikiwiki needs to
+sanitize the hell out of user inputted data before letting it anywhere near the
+shell.