Re: Emacs security issues; XEmacs affected?

Eric M. Ludlam writes: I second Mike's "thank you". It's possible to (relatively) safely do this by `read'ing sexps from the file rather than `load'ing the file.[1] Users can still specify executable code by using function symbols or lambdas, but they (and you) have much finer control over if and when to evaluate it. I think in the long run you should probably deprecate Project.ede- style configuration and move to a format that is an alist or plist that is read rather than loaded. Footnotes: [1] If you do it the easy way and just iterate over an alist automatically setq'ing the cars to the cdrs, you still have an attack by specifying a lambda as value for a hook variable or similar (eg, `fill-paragraph-function' is reasonably certain be called soon). Although desktop.el `read's its configuration rather than `load's it, this is why I suspect it's possible to execute code from an .emacs.desktop file. The user need not know unless they have their own fill-paragraph-function, as the lambda can be something like (lambda (&rest args) (do-your-evil-thing) (setq fill-paragraph-function nil) (apply #'fill-paragraph args))) A variant would let-bind `fill-paragraph-function', allowing the Evil Thing to be repeated frequently. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta