![]() |
|
Welcome to the Monastery | |
PerlMonks |
Paranoia, NIH, and Beyondby tadman (Prior) |
on Jan 10, 2001 at 07:21 UTC ( [id://50858]=note: print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
Certainly, for myself at least, getting modules off of CPAN and
installing them "blindly" is something that I do quite often. I
don't develop on just one machine, so to keep things managable,
I use the "cpan" program, which does exactly what I would do
anyway. Examining the source code with a fine-toothed comb on
every system is impractical, especially considering how many modules
I might need on a given project. Can you afford the time to check through CGI.pm every time you install it, examining it from top to bottom, looking for "evil" function calls? It's not like you're even going to see them either, as they could be mashed up in some unusual and deceptive format, the dark side of Obfuscated Perl, if you will. It is true, though, that the possibility of a module as popular as CGI.pm becoming "infected" in this way is slim, it is still non-zero. Fortunately, there is an extremely high possibility that someone else in the Perl community will discover the problem before you do. Someone will take one for the herd, and the rest will survive. I'm not working on some ultra-top secret military project where paranoia is not just a delusional fantasy, but a job requirement. In that case, I would certainly be curious about just what they are putting in the modules these days, and that is assuming I was bold enough to use "open-source" software in the first place. The "ftp; tar xvzf; make; make install" routine, and its equivalent on other platforms, is generally accepted as "the way things are done" , at least in the UNIX/"open-source" community. Few question the nature of it on a fundamental level, at least to the extent that any real change is effected. A non-intrusive, user-friendly, and low-impact addition to this methodology could be embraced, not only to extend the reach of Perl and other similar projects into a broader market, but to boost the confidence of the existing community in the quality and security of code that they are using. Food for thought: The CPAN system is about as "official" as you can get wrt. Perl modules, so any "effort" should be focused there. Consider something not altogether unlike what MS is doing with their "COM" objects:
Implementations could also be "paranoid", such as: use Module::Security qw(tested signed); # Example name use CGI; The more casual among us could merely opt out by installing anything anyway, just like they always do, without concern. The paranoid would avoid any unsigned modules, just like they always do, but at least they would be able to use Perl and a selection of its modules that are rigorously checked. A system such as this could work, assuming Perl itself isn't part of some Illuminati-style global conspiracy. Which it isn't. Right?
In Section
Meditations
|
|