GNU bug report logs - #19565
Emacs vulnerable to endless-data attack (minor)

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From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi <at> gnus.org>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
Cc: Stefan Kangas <stefan <at> marxist.se>, 19565 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#19565: Emacs vulnerable to endless-data attack (minor)
Date: Mon, 07 Oct 2019 03:51:35 +0200

Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> writes:

>> I think this affects more than just package.el.  AFAICT, anywhere we
>> use the url library, an endless data attack can get Emacs to fill up
>> all available memory (wasting also bandwidth resources, of course).
>
> At which point the system will kill the Emacs process.  Why is that a
> problem we need to work, given that we already have at least some
> protection against stack overflows and running out of memory?

It's not something we have to do, but it would be nice to have some
protection against this.

>> For example, a new keyword argument :max-size, which would make it
>> stop after having reached that many bytes.
>
> The Gnu Coding Standards frown on having arbitrary limits in a
> program.  So this could only work if we had some reasonable way of
> computing a limit that is not arbitrary.

I think it would perhaps make some sense to warn (or query) the user if
you get more data than `large-file-warning-threshold'.  I think it would
be pretty trivial to implement -- at least in the new with-fetched-url
interface, which I think is where this pretty theoretical problem is
least theoretical, perhaps?

On the other hand, I could see that in some ways it would be easier to
implement in wait_reading_process_output: We could just maintain a byte
counter in the process objects (if we don't do that already) and have a
callback we call if that counter grows larger than
`large-file-warning-threshold'.

That way Emacs wouldn't be open to flooding from, say, rogue SMTP
servers, either.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no

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