From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by olra.theworths.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 80186431FC0; Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:43:23 -0800 (PST) X-Virus-Scanned: Debian amavisd-new at olra.theworths.org Received: from olra.theworths.org ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (olra.theworths.org [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with ESMTP id CMaHH260lOkY; Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:43:22 -0800 (PST) Received: from cworth.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by olra.theworths.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 59FE7431FAE; Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:43:22 -0800 (PST) From: Carl Worth To: Jeffrey Ollie , Mikhail Gusarov In-Reply-To: <935ead450911272141g7ecf917ds1547fc95da3178aa@mail.gmail.com> References: <1259378883-9181-1-git-send-email-jeff@ocjtech.us> <87ws1be35o.fsf@vertex.dottedmag> <935ead450911272141g7ecf917ds1547fc95da3178aa@mail.gmail.com> Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:43:07 -0800 Message-ID: <87ws1brvyc.fsf@yoom.home.cworth.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/signed; boundary="=-=-="; micalg=pgp-sha1; protocol="application/pgp-signature" Cc: Not Much Mail Subject: Re: [PATCH] Use libgcrypt for hashing. X-BeenThere: notmuch@notmuchmail.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.12 Precedence: list List-Id: "Use and development of the notmuch mail system." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2009 06:43:23 -0000 --=-=-= Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On Fri, 27 Nov 2009 23:41:40 -0600, Jeffrey Ollie wrote: > That's great that you're willing to take on the task, but as I do a > lot of work for Fedora I tend to think about these things differently. > It's not about a project here or there making private copies of some > code, it's about tracking down *all* of the projects that have private > copies of the code when something goes wrong, especially when there > are security implications. Hi Jeffrey, Have you actually *looked* at the implementation of libsha1.c that we have in notmuch? I can't say with 100% certainty that it's free of any buffer overruns, but I can see that it's not doing any memory allocation nor network communication. So there are entire classes of security problems, (such as have afflicted libraries in your examples), that just aren't present here. And as for security compromises due to a bug in the cryptographic nature of this function---well, notmuch isn't even *using* SHA-1 for any secure purpose. The actual functionality that we need here is *so* small that I am unwilling to introduce a required dependency on any library as large as libcrypt. I mean, look at the actual sizes we're talking about $ size lib/notmuch.a text data bss dec hex filename 6774 0 0 6774 1a76 libsha1.o (ex lib/notmuch.a) 2372 0 4 2376 948 message-file.o (ex lib/notmuch.a) 756 0 0 756 2f4 messages.o (ex lib/notmuch.a) 405 0 0 405 195 sha1.o (ex lib/notmuch.a) 406 0 0 406 196 tags.o (ex lib/notmuch.a) 842 0 0 842 34a xutil.o (ex lib/notmuch.a) 15834 100 1 15935 3e3f database.o (ex lib/notmuch.a) 2826 0 4 2830 b0e index.o (ex lib/notmuch.a) 11834 0 4 11838 2e3e message.o (ex lib/notmuch.a) 7042 0 0 7042 1b82 query.o (ex lib/notmuch.a) 2553 0 0 2553 9f9 thread.o (ex lib/notmuch.a) $ size /usr/lib/libgcrypt.so.11.5.2=20 text data bss dec hex filename 466236 8424 748 475408 74110 /usr/lib/libgcrypt.so.11.5.2 You can see that libgcrypt is 7 times the size of all of libnotmuch.a combined. Now, if somebody wanted to maintain libsha1 inside a distribution like Debian, say, then I'd be happy to link against that version rather than a locally compiled version. And like I said earlier, if people would rather link against a large cyptographic library for this one tiny function, then we could arrange that too, but I don't think that justifies dropping this code from notmuch and introducing a hard dependency. =2DCarl --=-=-= Content-Type: application/pgp-signature -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFLEMZ76JDdNq8qSWgRAmLdAKCbnadhkGWuPzRX/04wKJQ7A3CcLACfZ5Sh h5zVHJHjqPWdcEloc9/6OL0= =8CoD -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --=-=-=--