[Users] Suggestion: Make |p{...} more secure

claws at dragony.name claws at dragony.name
Sun Oct 11 01:40:28 CEST 2020


Heyho!

I know, today this list is action-loaded but I promise I will stop stealing your time after this!

Just a suggestion and just ignore it if you don't care.

The following is used to execute a shell script:

|p{shellscript}

Since this is rather useless, people probably append parameters:

|p{shellscript %bla %bla2 %whatever}

It seems claws executes this the following way:

system("shellscript %bla %bla2 %whatever"); (Perl-Syntax)

This is insecure. Hackers can inject arbitrary shell codes and executes it on the user's system.

Better:

system(shellscript, arg0, arg1, arg2, ...);

This is secure, as the arguments are not being parsed by a shell.

Honestly I do not know about the internals of claws, but I tested with some ''-strings and I was able to execute additional commands.

- Dragony


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