Code Review Guidelines (draft)

[Igor Chudov @ home]

Adam,

The decision that have just made is not a technical decision, it is 
a business decision. You just decided that the needs of security 
outweight the need to be able to deal with 100% of potential customers.

For example, suppose that you wrote your report for Gizmo International, 
a company that sells a variety of widgets and gadgets to users in the
world. Their current setup is that the users can visit www.gizmo.com
and ask the server to send them notifications about new products.

Based on your report's suggestions, Gizmo will have to cut off
all users with x.400 mail addresses, all UUCP users with bangs in their
addresses, all people with funky addresses provided by SPRINT, 
and so on. For example, my moderation bot received a message
from the following person:

From: /G=JAMBYL/S=KIWANIS/O=CUSTOMER/ADMD=KAZMAIL/C=KZ/@gateway.sprint.com

(my eyes just popped when I saw such address)

There are a lot of international people using this sprint gateway.

This would potentially represent a loss of s significant number of 
customers who will be bitching about gizmo.com to all their friends.
This is a bad decision from the marketing standpoint.

I see this as a compelling reason to allow all possible email addresses
to be processed correctly, even if it means that there is more work
for code proofreading. At least the management responsible for
marketing must understand and approve your email handling guidelines. A
computer programmer cannot make such decisions himself.

igor


Adam Shostack wrote:
> 
> Igor, and many others who commented on the fact that many characters
> are legal in email are correct.  However, with the exception of '-'
> and '+', I'm not sure if I'll be changing the body of the guidelines.
> My issue is that dealing with a wide variety of characters that are
> legitamate, such as "cat ../../../etc/passwd"@foo.com is more
> dangerous than only accepting the common case of user at host.net.
> 
> The number of addresses such as harvard!adam is dropping as the number
> of 'normal' addresses grows.
> 
> 
> Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
> | Adam Shostack wrote:
> | > http://www.homeport.org/~adam/review.html
> 
> | In part " V.Code (Security Issues)/3.Data Checking" you say the following:
> | 
> | `` Data coming in to Acme Widgets should be checked very carefully for
> |         appropriateness. This check should be to see if the data is what
> |         is expected (length, characters). Making a list of bad
> |         characters is not the way to go; the lists are rarely complete.
> |         A secure program should know what it expects, and reject other
> |         input. (For example, if you are looking for an email address,
> |         don't check to see if it contains a semi-colon or a newline,
> |         check to see if it contains anything other than a [A-Za-z0-9._]
> |         followed by an @, followed by a hostname [A-Za-z0-9._].)''
> | END QUOTE
> | 
> | That is not entirely correct. An email address is much more than
> | that, it can contain "!", several "@" characters (not next to each other
> | though), "%", and so on. x400 mail addresses (?) can contain "/", "=",
> | and all emails can have "+" and "-" and "_" in them. 
> | 
> | Some of the valid email addresses are
> | 
> | user_name at company.com
> | alex+ at pitt.edu
> | mi%aldan.UUCP at algebra.com
> | user%host.domain at anon.penet.fi
> | host1!host2!user
> | 
> | Look at your sendmail.cf file for a humongous amount of 
> | email parsing rules.
> | 
> | Thanks for an excellent document though, I put a link to it from my
> | intranet page.
> 
> 	You're welcome.
> 
> | 	- Igor "Code Obscurity Creates Job Security" Chudov.
> | 
> 
> Adam
> 
> -- 
> "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
> 					               -Hume
> 



	- Igor.