On 2018-06-28, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote:
> So why give them the ability to escalate their privilege to that of > your application (which probably can do lots of things they can't > do) by directly executing Python code they supply? To be fair, that situation isn't common. The vast majority of applications run with the exact same set of privledges as the user who invoked them. At least that's the case on Linux/Unix. Perhaps Windows apps are different and the usual case is for many applications to have dangerous capabilities that an average user who's invoking them shouldn't have. That sounds stupid enough to be something that would be normal for Windows. I still maintain it's a bad idea to run arbitrary code found in user-edited config files. There may be cases where somebody has figured out how to muck with a config file that's shared among multiple users, or has tricked somebody into including something from an untrusted source in an include file. Or there could be users who don't know what they're doing and unwittingly type something harmful into a config file: bad_command = os.system("rm -rf ~/*") Yes, I know, users would never be that dumb... -- Grant Edwards grant.b.edwards Yow! Everybody gets free at BORSCHT! gmail.com -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list