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bug#75017: 31.0.50; Untrusted user lisp files


From: Dmitry Gutov
Subject: bug#75017: 31.0.50; Untrusted user lisp files
Date: Wed, 25 Dec 2024 01:29:36 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird

On 23/12/2024 14:31, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
And Emacs will load whatever's written there on the next restart.
Whether the user wrote to those files, or someone else.
Yes, and your point is..?
That whatever malicious code we try to protect against using the
"trusted content" mechanism would be executed anyway.
The scenario I have in mind is this:

   . Emacs session is running; when it was started, there was no
     site-init file
   . User notices that site-init file appeared
   . User visits the site-init file
   . Malicious macro in site-init file is executed

IOW, there could be valid situations where the user visits the file
before restarting Emacs (which would load the file).  In these
situations, it would make sense to treat the file as not trusted --
unless the user tells us it should always be unconditionally trusted.

IMO, we should only make files and directories trusted by default if
we are either 100% sure they can never be malicious

Thank you. So the scenario where we would make the distinction is when the user managed to notice (somehow?) that the file had changed during the Emacs session, and then went to edit it.

To be frank, I asked the question after reading the scenario from the first message, and it talks about early-init-file. IIUC this file lives in the same dir as the plain user-init-file, so the chances of them being edited by someone other than the user should be about equal, and we do "trust" the latter file automatically.

Probably not too critical, but inconsistencies can be annoying (the user has to spend time figuring out whether something is broken and why).





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