[Python-Dev] Let's update CObject API so it is safe and regular! (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Thu Apr 2 04:08:56 CEST 2009

On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 5:39 PM, Larry Hastings <larry at hastings.org> wrote:

Guido van Rossum wrote: This is a bug in cPickle. It calls the PycStringIMPORT macro at the very end of its initstuff() function without checking for success.

The bug you cite is a genuine bug, but that's not what I'm exploiting. % python

import socket socket.CAPI <PyCObject object at 0xb7d5b500> The PyCObjectImport() call in PycStringIMPORT doesn't return failure--it returns a valid CObject.  I stuck the wrong CObject in cStringIO on purpose.  With the current API there's no way for cPickle to tell that it's using the wrong one.

Ouch. So true.

For what it's worth, the previous example was for Python 2.x.  (Python 3 doesn't have "cStringIO" or "cPickle".)  Here's an example that crashes python in my py3k/trunk (sync'd Monday morning).  And this one's only three lines:

import unicodedata import multibytecodec _multibytecodec.createcodec(unicodedata.ucnhashCAPI)

Yeah, any two CAPI objects can be used to play this trick, as long as you have some place that calls them. :-(

So what's your solution? If it was me I'd change the API to put the full module name and variable name of the object inside the object and have the IMPORT call check that. Then you can only have crashes if some extension module cheats, and surely there are many other ways that C extensions can cheat, so that doesn't bother me. :)

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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