Re: Some findings and suggestion about Emacs on w32

[storm@cua.dk (Kim F. Storm)]

Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org> writes:

> Thanks. I think the main area that needs porting is the use of
> unix domain sockets for communicating between emacsclient and the
> server. I think there are some security issues with changing to
> TCP or UDP sockets (this has been discussed in the past too), so
> mailslots are probably the best replacement on Windows.

The problem with TCP is that it may allow access from other users on
the same machine and from other machines in the network.

But it is easy to avoid connections from other machines -- just
use :host "127.0.0.1" when creating the emacs server socket, then
it only listens for connections from the local host.

And on windoze, I don't think there (typically) are that many
other users active at the same time...

Someone else pointed out that the use of a personal firewalls
on Windows should be an problem for using TCP for emacs server.

Actually, I think that it is an advantage, as the firewall will block
external access to the emacs server (as an extra security), but not
interfere with local access (to 127.0.0.1).

If mailslots allow external access bypassing the firewall, I think
that's a big problem speaking against mailslots.

-- 
Kim F. Storm <storm@cua.dk> http://www.cua.dk