Re: [Boston.pm] Historical question: origin of the idea of tainting

Bill Ricker via Boston-pm <[email protected]> Wed, 17 Apr 2019 16:50:47 -0400
Newsgroups gmane.comp.lang.perl.perl-mongers.boston
Organization The Perl Shop
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On 4/17/19 13:15, Andy Oram wrote:
> Ah, so now it goes back to the 1980s! Thanks.

Yes, Taint was originally for trying to make SETUID scripts safe from
injection attacks via CLI arguments (@ARGV) on multiuser UNIX (POSIX)
systems ... before Linux, before WWW.  Because Perl originally scratched
Larry's itch as a Usenet Newsadmin / Sysadmin back in the day.

Alas any late binding is unsafe with SETUID, so setuid interpretative
scripts eventually had to be banned entirely. (Dynamic library binding
by a executable is unsafe, but not specifically banned. Yet.)

But that meant Perl had Taint mode ready and waiting as a solution when
WWW required CGI scripts which required injection-proofing.

-- 
Bill Ricker
independent contractor for The Perl Shop

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