[Dancer-users] Need help in understanding the role of taint handling in Dancer

[Gurunandan Bhat]

Thanks Flavio.


   1. The input string for encryption is byte-level identical in both cases.
   I have used unpack to look at the input string in both cases to confirm
   this. I have run a large number of tests.
   2. I have used the regular expression trick to untaint (just in case) in
   my own code. In addition, I am using Data::FormValidator to validate the
   input strings so I guess it uses a regexp check in any case. For good
   measure I have passed the option untaint_all_constraints => 1 to DFV just in
   case.
   3. There is something in the Dancer runtime environment that makes
   Crypt::OpenSSL::RSA do the wrong thing. If it is not taint and it is not
   encoding (which I have confirmed) - what could it be? If I knew this I could
   pass it on to the Crypt::OpenSSL::RSA guys so that they can fix whatever it
   is thats going wrong there.


Thanks once again for your time and your attention



On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 12:18 PM, Flavio Poletti <polettix at gmail.com> wrote:

> I would be surprised if taint is the cause of your pain. From what I know:
>
> * you are the sole responsible for activating taint mode. It has to be set
> in the hash-bang and possibly provided on the command line;
> * when taint kicks in something like "die()" happens, so you should be
> pretty aware of it (unless you wrap it all with eval() and throw away any
> error).
>
> You can try your command-line script with taint mode turned on by means of
> the "-T" command-line switch (see perldoc perlrun for details). If you want
> to try and untaint the input string for the password, you have to use a
> regular expression:
>
> my ($untainted_password) = $tainted_password =~ /(.*)/;
>
> Note that the "blind untaint" method above is frowned upon, tainting is all
> about forcing you (the programmer) to carefully check your inputs so you
> should try to figure out the correct way to validate the input. In this case
> I think that we can assume that any character is valid for a password, so
> the whole string is good.
>
>
> One thing I'd look at is encoding. I'd try to see whether, in the two
> different contexts, the two password:
>
> 1. have the same encoding status (use utf8::is_utf8() for this, see perldoc
> utf8)
> 2. are exactly the same (in this case I'd use something like
>
>    warning unpack 'H*', $password;
>
> in order to see the raw bytes in hex).
>
> Good luck,
>
>     Flavio.
>
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 8:20 PM, Gurunandan Bhat <gbhat at pobox.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I am in the process of writing a Dancer application that does (in part)
>> some heavy lifting of PKI (RSA) [en|de]cryption using Crypt::OpenSSL::RSA
>> and a few other Crypt::* modules and have been hit with an issue that I do
>> not fully understand. Here is a rough sequence of what happens:
>>
>>
>>    1. I have written a Moose based class that does PKI stuff. One of the
>>    the methods in this class is encrypting binary strings using a Public Key.
>>    The Public Key is read from a file on disk.
>>    2. When I run a test script with this class, the encryption works
>>    fine.
>>    3. When I run the same script as a route handler in Dancer the
>>    encryption silently produces the wrong result - decrypting it does not give
>>    me the original string.
>>    4. Testing is a bit hard and complicated due to the fact that RSA
>>    encryption is not deterministic and encrypting the same string twice will
>>    give wildly different strings but decrypting both should correctly give the
>>    original string. However after a few days of trying out multiple test code -
>>    I am reasonably certain that *encryption with Crypt::OpenSSL::RSA
>>    gives the correct result from the command line but gives the wrong result
>>    when run as a Dance route handler*.I am currently working around this
>>    by doing the encryption through a script on disk which the route handler
>>    runs - but this is obviously too silly for words.
>>
>> The only thing I can attribute this to is that my input string collected
>> from a form and/or my public key object which I read from file are marked as
>> tainted in Dancer but not in a command line script and that
>> Crypt::OpenSSL::RSA has a bug when used with tainted variables. This is a
>> conjecture but the only one that seems likely given the large amount of
>> testing that I have done.
>>
>> With this background here are a couple of questions that I have:
>>
>>
>>    1. Does Dancer taint input variables received from the user(-form)?
>>    2. If yes, how do I untaint it.
>>    3. How can I conclusively confirm that taintedness is causing the
>>    difference in output between the command line script and the route handler.
>>    With identical inputs to my command line script and to my route handler I am
>>    certain that there is a difference in output. I am wondering if taintedness
>>    is the cause.
>>
>> Thank you for your patience in reading this rather long message
>>
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>>
>
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