[Libguestfs] [PATCH V3] virt-diff: add new virt-diff tool

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 05:43:10PM +0800, Wanlong Gao wrote:
> On 08/21/2012 04:25 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > Another thing: Don't use sprintf, ever.  With the wrong $TMPDIR that
> > code above is a security hole.  Since you need to quote 'dir' (since
> > it comes from user input) you're going to have to rewrite the whole
> > call to system(3) so that it uses fork + exec instead.
> 
> Can you explain more? Sorry I can't understand where is the security
> hole.

sprintf doesn't check the size of the output buffer.  The output
buffer always needs to be sized big enough for all inputs, else you'll
have a buffer overflow.  The simple way to avoid this is to use
asprintf which allocates the output buffer of the correct size for
you.

> And if I use fork + exec, how can I make "stempdir" and "dir"
> together to an "argv[]" for the argument of exec?

Have a look at:

https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/f9f0767e20847734db3747c06b4ff11729a62a07/src/launch.c#L527

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines.  Supports shell scripting,
bindings from many languages.  http://libguestfs.org