Re: disabling 'insecure' parts of gnuplot file

[Hans-Bernhard B. <br...@ph...>]

Arun Persaud wrote:

> How about disabling the "!" command completely and checking that the 
> output file is in the right directory... deleting the "< ..."  option 
> for input files might also be a good thing...

As Ethan already pointed out, that would run into serious usability 
problems.

> shouldn't be too much work to delete the right lines in the source code...

Deleting them: no, that wouldn't be hard.  But *finding* them would be,
esp. if you want to be sure you found not just some of the relevant 
lines, but strictly *all* of them.  Miss just one, and you've turned a 
known-insecure program into a presumably secure one with a hole.  That 
would be rather the opposite of an improvement.

> I'm not sure though in what other ways you could trick gnuplot to do 
> dangerous things...

Neither are we.  That's why I wrote that there are no way of doing that 
is foreseen in the source.  This would require a full-blown audit of the 
entire code, and IMHO neither the team nor the code is in the condition 
that would warrant trying that.