This is when taint mode is at its most useful: you didn't realize that the security of your program depended in part on an environment variable, Perl noticed that it did, and stopped the program before it did something that might be dangerous. It forced you to find the dependency, think about whether it's a real security problem or not, and then deal with it appropriately.

If there had been an easy way to turn off taint mode, you most likely would have turned it off based on your faulty assumptions about the problem coming from symlink ownership. Instead, you found a possible bug you didn't know about, and probably made your program more secure.

And the world is safe again. TaintMode++.


--
sgifford's Web page

In reply to Re^3: Insecure dependency in open by sgifford
in thread Insecure dependency in open by argv

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