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Comment by userbinator

5 days ago

there is no permissions scheme

If you already have full access by design, then there's no "huge security hole" either.

17 comments

userbinator

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alper  4 days ago

This is entirely how FP is supposed to work. Don't like that, don't use it.

It ships database files over the network and does that blazingly fast.

EvanAnderson  5 days ago

Exactly. It's not a security hole. It's just the architecture of the program.

It seems like many people have a hard time understanding this, including developers.

Any attempt to add any kind of permissions, security, etc, without addressing the nature of the architecture (that the database engine runs in the same address space / security context as the UI) misses the point.

  • Towaway69  4 days ago

    Further along those lines, it was a different world when the code was created.

    Trust was a thing back then. Spam was something that came out of a tin and was made of dead animal. And passwords were limited to eight ASCII characters.

    And as such, bolting security onto something that was designed inherently to be security agnostic is going to be a recipe for failure.

    • antonvs  4 days ago

      It had absolutely nothing to do with trust. People still worried about the security of their databases. Businesses understood perfectly well that their electronic records were just as sensitive as their paper ones. But the server closet had a lock on the door, and no wire connecting it to a global network of mostly scammers. It was just as secure as the paper records.

    • mikestew  4 days ago

      Trust was a thing back then.

      No, it wasn't. The reason I even raised this bug to begin with was not because of some nefarious $BAD_COUNTRY hacker getting yer dataz from far away, it's because you have to worry about your own users first. I'd guess that any consultant doing the kind of work FoxPro excelled at (LOB apps) has found some clever boy or girl who discovered they can poke at DBF files directly. Long before internet connectivity was common, one still had to worry about your own coworkers futzing things up.

  • shermantanktop  5 days ago

    You’re saying it’s not a 2 tier client/server app, it’s a one tier app with no intermediate API to define or enforce permissions. Fine.

    But the filesystem access to read/write the db files creates a path to bypass half of that application.

    Does the application checksum the db file and have any resistance to filesystem tampering? That'd be trivial to beat, I’m sure, but it’d be something.

    • aforwardslash  5 days ago

      Well, on a different note, if you have a scripted language application, you typically can edit files and bypass whatever you want on the application. In fact, I'd bet most modern software isn't signed; and even if it is, sometimes the libraries that get compiled in into that signed binary... aren't.

      I can change the behaviour of many/most applications by just having read/write access to files; Can you give me examples of mainstream applications that are resistant to filesystem tampering when eg.you have install access? Maybe I'm missing something.

    • lelanthran  4 days ago

      > But the filesystem access to read/write the db files creates a path to bypass half of that application.

      Is there any local/native application for which this is not true?

      4 replies →

mikestew  5 days ago

Well, I had to call it something. File system DBs were a problem long before FoxPro’s DBCs, yes. Yes, it’s an architectural decision. Sharp cookies would just modify the files directly. But that would just trash data (or bump my hourly rate in the HR DB). Most of the time, “full access to data” doesn’t necessarily mean “run arbitrary code”. In this case, it does, which I don’t think folks expect, hence “hole”.