oss-security - Re: Python Unsafe Module Loading

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Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 10:10:55 +0200
From: Robert Buchholz <rbu@...too.org>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Cc: Ned Ludd <solar@...too.org>
Subject: Re: Python Unsafe Module Loading

On Wednesday 04 June 2008, Ned Ludd wrote:
> So for nearly every python based program you can simply dump  *.so
> *.py *.pyc files just about anywhere on the file system where an
> admin might invoke python.

As I also pointed out in our bug [1], this only happens in two cases:
(1) The interactive shell is used to run python code.
(2) A python script resides inside an untrusted directory.

What I expect to be the most common use case, running python code 
from /usr, or /home, is safe. Since all out-of-the-box software would 
be installed in directories that are not world-writable, I am tempted 
call (2) an error on the user side. Changing the behaviour of python in 
this manner would also break existing programs.

Robert

[1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=224925

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