Re: Geany IDE not escaping filenames during compilation / build - a security issue or not?

[Andreas Ericsson <ae () op5 se>]

On 12/13/2012 12:21 PM, Jan Lieskovsky wrote:
> Hi Andreas,
>
>    I think it's unlikely to happen for one file.
> But what for project with (hundred, thousand of) small files?
>
> Is the user prior building expected to investigate file name of
> each of them for sanity? This is where trust boundary is crossed -
> someone could send you a tarball: "Here is the source you were
> searching for." You would go to build it in Geany..

Hold on here. The report is for geany, so for geany's filename
escaping to actually be at fault, you would still have to load the
offending file into the editor. Otherwise, just running 'make' from
the command line would trigger the exact same effect, except that
make is (as has been pointed out) designed to run arbitrary shell
commands already and therefore won't be doing anything wrong.

> The difference when running it directly from the command line is
> that Bash would escape those files for you, so even with crafted names
> nothing bad / suspicious would happen (and project would build
> if syntactically correct).

Except that people wouldn't manually compile thousands of files
one by one. That's where build systems come in.

> To the difference, in the Geany scenario, the file name(s) would
> be passed to command line directly as they are (and if the project
> would build or not at the end isn't what matters here).

For the original report to be valid, the file would still have to
be loaded into geany, or the report should have been about some
other program. This is not a security issue that concerns geany.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson () op5 se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231

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