Re: Fw: Security risk of vim swap files

[Simon McVittie <smcv () debian org>]

On Tue, 31 Oct 2017 at 20:33:30 -0600, Leonid Isaev wrote:
> 1. vim creates a swap file applying user's umask.

More specifically, this should be (and does indeed seem to be) the
permissions of the file being edited, masked by the user's umask -
so that if have a loose umask and I edit a secret file, the swap file
doesn't leak its contents.

~/tmp/vim% umask
022
~/tmp/vim% ls -Al
total 4
-rw------- 1 smcv smcv 8 Nov  1 09:50 secret-file
~/tmp/vim% gvim secret-file
~/tmp/vim% ls -Al
total 16
-rw------- 1 smcv smcv 12288 Nov  1 09:50 .secret-file.swp
-rw------- 1 smcv smcv     8 Nov  1 09:50 secret-file

A more naive implementation might have created .secret-file.swp with
-rw-r--r-- permissions according to my umask, but that would have been
bad.

Regards,
    smcv