[tahoe-dev] Fwd: [cap-talk] Don't put capabilities in argv?

[Rob Meijer]

On Tue, July 22, 2008 02:27, zooko wrote:
>  > For these two, I learned this lessen the hard way that having a race
>  > condition means having an expoitable race condition. Don't spent
>  > precious development time or recources and/or add complexity to your
>  > program to 'reduce the window', it is simply not woth it IMHO.
>
> Could you tell us more about what you learned the hard way?  It sounds
> plausible to me that a narrow window of vulnerability could lead to
> trouble, but I would like to know to what degree it actually did lead
> to trouble in practice.

In my experience it seems that code designed to 'reduce the window' will:

* hide the flaw from regular users.
* not provide a real obstacle for someone wanting to exploit the
  remaining race condition.
* reduce the general maintainability of the codebase by adding hard to
  understand code.

Rob