Re: C set-user-ID program wrapper for Perl script and security

Andrew Poelstra said:

On 2008-08-31, Richard Heathfield <rjh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Peter Michaux said:

On Aug 30, 3:03 pm, "Malcolm McLean" <regniz...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

it is reasonable to hardcode paths in a Perl script,
much less sensible to do so in a C program.

Why is that?

No reason whatsoever. Malcolm is wrong. If you want to hardcode paths in
a C program, go to it. There will be an impact on portability (because
the path might not have the same semantics or might not even exist on
another machine), but that argument applies just as much to the Perl
script.


Not really - a C program is almost always compiled, which means to change
a hardcoded path one needs to have access to the source code. By nature,
a Perl script is itself the source, meaning that any hardcoded paths are
going to be human-readable and mutable.

Fair point - but let's compare like with like. If you're shipping source,
ship source, in which case the C program is just as human-readable as the
Perl script (and possibly *more* so, given typical Perl scripts!), and
just as mutable. All you need then is a C compiler (which is analogous to
the Perl interpreter).

--
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: -http://www. +rjh@
Google users: <http://www.cpax.org.uk/prg/writings/googly.php>
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
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