[Python-Dev] [Python-checkins] cpython (2.7): Fix closes issue10761: tarfile.extractall failure when symlinked files are (original) (raw)

Eli Bendersky eliben at gmail.com
Fri Apr 29 10:02:51 CEST 2011

On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 09:52, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 4:26 PM, Eli Bendersky <eliben at gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 04:20:06PM +0200, Éric Araujo wrote: The kind of race condition which can happen here is if an attacker creates "targetpath" between os.path.exists and os.unlink. Whether it is an exploitable flaw would need a detailed analysis, of course.

Just out of curiosity, could you please elaborate on the potential threat of this? If the "exists" condition is true, targetpath already exists, so what use there is in overwriting it? If the condition is false, unlink isn't executed, so no harm either. What am I missing? That's the "detailed analysis" part. What happens if other code deletes the path, and the unlink() call subsequently fails despite the successful exists() check? Hence why exception checking (as Nadeem posted) is typically the only right way to do things that access an external environment that supports multiple concurrent processes.

I completely understand this "other code/thread deletes the path between exists() and unlink()" case - it indeed is a race condition waiting to happen. What I didn't understand was Antoine's example of "attacker creates targetpath between os.path.exists and os.unlink", and was asking for a more detailed example, since I'm not really experienced with security-oriented thinking.

Eli

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