On Mon, 21 Nov 2005, Chris Dolan wrote:
If CPAN made it easy to install unintended software by mistake, that
would be a huge security hole. Some people run cpan as root.
Defensive programming is absolutely the right thing here.
And how exactly would a shortcut that says "oh you asked for something
that isn't really a module name, would you like us to install THIS package
which contains CERTAIN modules anyway?" cause security issues? I run the
cpan shell as root all the time. Its a pain to have to remember the CPAN
caniptions every time I'm setting up a new random server and the less
often you deal with it the more likely you will have forgotten it all.
This is exactly the context where the sort of shortcut that Perl is known
for should be eximplified but its not. It may be the individual's first
exposure to the Perl world. Let's not make it suck because of weak fears.
PathTools and Template Toolkit are both examples where the thing to type
into CPAN isn't clear to the newbie sysadmins. If we had a list of things
like that for the important modules that have such strangeness then
there should be any security problem in doing this without prompting since
those mappings would be official and Known To Be OK. If I say
install TemplateToolkit
or
install Template::Toolkit
having that map to
install Template
without too much fuss is not only harmless and significantly helpful it
might even be a security benefit since I won't accidentally install three
other templating things in the meantime hoping to find the right one. The
amount of time saved for sysadmins all over the world without causing
anyone one iota of actual harm is awe-inspiring.
So, am I really missing something here? Is there really some chance for a
harmful mistake being made that can't be trivially mitigated with
solutions like I mentioned above?
--
</chris>
There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make
it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way
is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
-- C.A.R. Hoare
