nowfound

Dev tools · July 23, 2022

CI

Code in Response to “The Trouble with Symlinks.”

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32190032 This was written in about the past hour or so; it has no documentation or test cases yet. Think twice before relying on it in production. The idea is that we can perform a detailed validation of the trustworthiness of an absolute or relative path, as a simple function that can be reused anywhere: I call this function safepath_check. A trustworthy path is one whose meaning cannot be changed by a third party: another user who isn't root. The path is therefore immune, for instance, to TOCtoTOU security problems, like the…

Code in Response to “The Trouble with Symlinks.” launched on July 23, 2022 with 5 votes, #1,079 of 2,916 launches that month and more than 50% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 4 years on.

What it does

safepath is tiny library written in C, targeting POSIX systems. Its core functionality is concentrated in a single function safepath_check . safepath_check performs one function: it takes a filename consisting of one or more path components, and returns an indication whether that name is safe for the process to use. Safe means that the pathname doesn't contain any component which could be tampered with by a user other than the effective user ID of the caller, or else root. Checking the permissions of an object is insufficient. Suppose we are a superuser process such as a server trying to access some application- specific password file /data/path/to/passwd . If we check that the permissions…from kylheku.com

In the maker’s words, at launch

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32190032 This was written in about the past hour or so; it has no documentation or test cases yet. Think twice before relying on it in production. The idea is that we can perform a detailed validation of the trustworthiness of an absolute or relative path, as a…

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