freebsd-dev/lib/libc/gen/wordexp.3
Jilles Tjoelker d358fa780b wordexp: Rewrite to make WRDE_NOCMD reliable.
Shell syntax is too complicated to detect command substitution and unquoted
operators reliably without implementing much of sh's parser. Therefore, have
sh do this detection.

While changing sh's support anyway, also read input from a pipe instead of
arguments to avoid {ARG_MAX} limits and improve privacy, and output count
and length using 16 instead of 8 digits.

The basic concept is:
execl("/bin/sh", "sh", "-c", "freebsd_wordexp ${1:+\"$1\"} -f "$2",
    "", flags & WRDE_NOCMD ? "-p" : "", <pipe with words>);

The WRDE_BADCHAR error is still implemented in libc. POSIX requires us to
fail strings containing unquoted braces with code WRDE_BADCHAR. Since this
is normally not a syntax error in sh, there is still a need for checking
code in libc, we_check().

The new we_check() is an optimistic check that all the characters
  <newline> | & ; < > ( ) { }
are quoted. To avoid duplicating too much sh logic, such characters are
permitted when quoting characters are seen, even if the quoting characters
may themselves be quoted. This code reports all WRDE_BADCHAR errors; bad
characters that get past it and are a syntax error in sh return WRDE_SYNTAX.

Although many implementations of WRDE_NOCMD erroneously allow some command
substitutions (and ours even documented this), there appears to be code that
relies on its security (codesearch.debian.net shows quite a few uses).
Passing untrusted data to wordexp() still exposes a denial of service
possibility and a fairly large attack surface.

Reviewed by:	wblock (man page only)
MFC after:	2 weeks
Relnotes:	yes
Security:	fixes command execution with wordexp(untrusted, WRDE_NOCMD)
2015-09-30 21:32:29 +00:00

211 lines
5.0 KiB
Groff

.\"
.\" Copyright (c) 2002 Tim J. Robbins
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.\" $FreeBSD$
.\"
.Dd September 30, 2015
.Dt WORDEXP 3
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm wordexp
.Nd "perform shell-style word expansions"
.Sh LIBRARY
.Lb libc
.Sh SYNOPSIS
.In wordexp.h
.Ft int
.Fn wordexp "const char * restrict words" "wordexp_t * restrict we" "int flags"
.Ft void
.Fn wordfree "wordexp_t *we"
.Sh DESCRIPTION
The
.Fn wordexp
function performs shell-style word expansion on
.Fa words
and places the list of words into the
.Va we_wordv
member of
.Fa we ,
and the number of words into
.Va we_wordc .
.Pp
The
.Fa flags
argument is the bitwise inclusive OR of any of the following constants:
.Bl -tag -width ".Dv WRDE_SHOWERR"
.It Dv WRDE_APPEND
Append the words to those generated by a previous call to
.Fn wordexp .
.It Dv WRDE_DOOFFS
As many
.Dv NULL
pointers as are specified by the
.Va we_offs
member of
.Fa we
are added to the front of
.Va we_wordv .
.It Dv WRDE_NOCMD
Disallow command substitution in
.Fa words .
See the note in
.Sx BUGS
before using this.
.It Dv WRDE_REUSE
The
.Fa we
argument was passed to a previous successful call to
.Fn wordexp
but has not been passed to
.Fn wordfree .
The implementation may reuse the space allocated to it.
.It Dv WRDE_SHOWERR
Do not redirect shell error messages to
.Pa /dev/null .
.It Dv WRDE_UNDEF
Report error on an attempt to expand an undefined shell variable.
.El
.Pp
The
.Vt wordexp_t
structure is defined in
.In wordexp.h
as:
.Bd -literal -offset indent
typedef struct {
size_t we_wordc; /* count of words matched */
char **we_wordv; /* pointer to list of words */
size_t we_offs; /* slots to reserve in we_wordv */
} wordexp_t;
.Ed
.Pp
The
.Fn wordfree
function frees the memory allocated by
.Fn wordexp .
.Sh IMPLEMENTATION NOTES
The
.Fn wordexp
function is implemented using the undocumented
.Ic freebsd_wordexp
shell built-in command.
.Sh RETURN VALUES
The
.Fn wordexp
function returns zero if successful, otherwise it returns one of the following
error codes:
.Bl -tag -width ".Dv WRDE_NOSPACE"
.It Dv WRDE_BADCHAR
The
.Fa words
argument contains one of the following unquoted characters:
.Aq newline ,
.Ql | ,
.Ql & ,
.Ql \&; ,
.Ql < ,
.Ql > ,
.Ql \&( ,
.Ql \&) ,
.Ql { ,
.Ql } .
.It Dv WRDE_BADVAL
An error after successful parsing,
such as an attempt to expand an undefined shell variable with
.Dv WRDE_UNDEF
set in
.Fa flags .
.It Dv WRDE_CMDSUB
An attempt was made to use command substitution and
.Dv WRDE_NOCMD
is set in
.Fa flags .
.It Dv WRDE_NOSPACE
Not enough memory to store the result or
an error during
.Xr fork 2 .
.It Dv WRDE_SYNTAX
Shell syntax error in
.Fa words .
.El
.Pp
The
.Fn wordfree
function returns no value.
.Sh ENVIRONMENT
.Bl -tag -width ".Ev IFS"
.It Ev IFS
Field separator.
.El
.Sh EXAMPLES
Invoke the editor on all
.Pa .c
files in the current directory
and
.Pa /etc/motd
(error checking omitted):
.Bd -literal -offset indent
wordexp_t we;
wordexp("${EDITOR:-vi} *.c /etc/motd", &we, 0);
execvp(we.we_wordv[0], we.we_wordv);
.Ed
.Sh DIAGNOSTICS
Diagnostic messages from the shell are written to the standard error output
if
.Dv WRDE_SHOWERR
is set in
.Fa flags .
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr sh 1 ,
.Xr fnmatch 3 ,
.Xr glob 3 ,
.Xr popen 3 ,
.Xr system 3
.Sh STANDARDS
The
.Fn wordexp
and
.Fn wordfree
functions conform to
.St -p1003.1-2001 .
.Sh BUGS
The current
.Fn wordexp
implementation does not recognize multibyte characters other than UTF-8, since
the shell (which it invokes to perform expansions) does not.
.Sh SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS
Pathname generation may create output that is exponentially larger than the
input size.
.Pp
Although this implementation detects command substitution reliably for
.Dv WRDE_NOCMD ,
the attack surface remains fairly large.
Also, some other implementations
(such as older versions of this one)
may execute command substitutions even if
.Dv WRDE_NOCMD
is set.