discuss-gnustep
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Remove GSAppKitUserBundles


From: Matt Campbell
Subject: Re: Remove GSAppKitUserBundles
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2011 18:55:00 -0500
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.15) Gecko/20110303 Thunderbird/3.1.9

I don't understand why such a bundle-loading mechanism is considered a security hole. IMO, the proper response to security concerns is to sandbox untrusted code; of course, that's outside the scope of GNUstep.

More generally, a generic mechanism for loading additional modules at runtime, such as this one, allows developers to extend a platform in ways that the platform's creators or maintainers didn't foresee. It's worth noting that GTK+ has the GTK_MODULES variable for loading extra modules at startup. Back in the GTK 1.x days, that mechanism was used to develop a prototype screen reader for GTK, before there was a proper accessibility API. More recently, I've seen that the Openmoko project has a module called libgtkstylus that's loaded through that same variable. Anyway, I would strongly discourage removing a simple feature that increases the extensibility of GNUstep. But maybe I just don't understand the security risk.

Matt




reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]