Re: [Bug-apl] Safe mode is not so safe

[Juergen Sauermann]

Hi Blake,

we currently have a -p option with a numerical argument N. That N is used to select
one of several sections in the GNU APL preference file(s).

I am expecting that the actual configuration of --safe features might become quite complex in the
long run, so we need an easy to use and central place for configuring what shall be allowed and
what not in a modular way. Something like this:

apl -p 5

and in preferences file(s):

[5]
   disable_SQL
   disable_⎕FIO
...

Sometimes security options and non-security options go hand in hand, and the profile mechanism of
GNU APL can accommodate both cases in a simple way.

Best Regards,
Jürgen Sauermann

On 03/30/2017 01:36 AM, Blake McBride wrote:

Just a thought...  What if --safe took an argument, like "--save 1", "--safe 2", etc.

On Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 10:52 AM, Elias Mårtenson <address@hidden> wrote:

Very good points, thank you. You articulated my own concerns as I tried to quantify the requirements, and what the risks are. 

The central need here is the ability to compute formulas that are not entirely under your own control. In my case, I want to provide the ability to evaluate APL expressions on the #jsoftware IRC channel. They already have a bot that does J, so APL is clearly needed. 

There are of course other use cases, and as you pointed out a single option may not be enough (or be too much). 

I'm starting to think about a more granular mechanism. Some way of evaluating just a single _expression_ using very strict protections, but letting the rest be unconstrained. Controlled using a quad variable perhaps? (the variable could contain a list of the operations that should be allowed or denied when evaluating a given string). 

Regards, 

Elias 

On 29 Mar 2017 23:40, "Juergen Sauermann" <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi Elias,

I understand and to some extent support the desire to make the safe mode more safe. However, we should not go too far with it because
that has the risk of making --safe so restrictive that useful operations are no linger possible.

For example disabling SQL operations completely would make it impossible to display data from an SQL file in a web page.
I would rather argue that in this example, setting the file permissions of the SQL files would be more appropriate than disabling SQL
entirely. I also tend to believe that it is simply impossible to implement the security of a machine as a single command-line option
of one program.

And e.g. preventing )COPY would render many existing workspaces useless. For example, my own HTML pages do )COPY HTML
before anything else. Preventing ⎕FIO would also disable socket() operations which are quite useful if you want to do a web server
directly in apl.

So lets discuss what a reasonable list would look like, and then (based on the length of the list) how to implement the restrictions
(via ./configure, or in preferences files, or as command line option(s)).

Best Regads,
/// Jürgen

On 03/29/2017 06:21 AM, Elias Mårtenson wrote:

I'm implementing an IRC bot that can run arbitrary APL expressions. Since this bot can run code submitted by anyone, I need to ensure that the code can't affect the system where the APL expressions are executed.

This is the purpose of the --safe flag, but I have noted that several destructive operations are still permitted when using this flag.

In particular:

• SQL operations
• FILE_IO
• )OUT
  
• )DUMP, )DUMPV, )DUMP-HTML
• )COPY, )LOAD, etc…
• )HOST

There is probably more, but preventing these would be a good start.

Regards,

Elias