From: "J. Ryan Sobol" <ryansobol@...>
Date: 2006-01-10T00:13:52+09:00
Subject: Re: "Living Dangerous" stage 2, summarizing ideas

--Apple-Mail-18--401368338
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset=US-ASCII;
	delsp=yes;
	format=flowed

On Jan 9, 2006, at 5:18 AM, zimbatm wrote:

> First example. Imaging you're building a big web application where
> users can submit their templates (eg. blog or wiki hosting) and you're
> using embedded ruby in html. How can you trust that the user won't  
> send
> an "evil" template without reviewing it ? (disregarding javascript XSS
> exploits)

> Second example. You're implementing a remote execution mechanism with
> agents. Like Java's JINI, you want clients to send pieces of code that
> will be executed in the server's environment and then give the result
> back. It's a bit like the client would send blocks to the server. How
> do you avoid the client sending "evil" code that would redefine how  
> the
> server would work ?

These problems are one and the same: never, ever, ever trust user  
data. (completed web forms, templates, client-side code, etc.)    
Would you really not examine the template if it where embedded PHP or  
something similar?  Is it not possible for client-side code to do  
"bad things" in JINI?  I argue that this is not the fault of the  
language, but problems inherent to the world the application lives in.

~ ryan ~
--Apple-Mail-18--401368338--