3.0 KiB
filepath-securejoin
An implementation of SecureJoin
, a candidate for inclusion in the Go
standard library. The purpose of this function is to be a "secure"
alternative to filepath.Join
, and in particular it provides certain
guarantees that are not provided by filepath.Join
.
NOTE: This code is only safe if you are not at risk of other processes modifying path components after you've used
SecureJoin
. If it is possible for a malicious process to modify path components of the resolved path, then you will be vulnerable to some fairly trivial TOCTOU race conditions. There are some Linux kernel patches I'm working on which might allow for a better solution.In addition, with a slightly modified API it might be possible to use
O_PATH
and verify that the opened path is actually the resolved one -- but I have not done that yet. I might add it in the future as a helper function to help users verify the path (we can't just return/proc/self/fd/<foo>
because that doesn't always work transparently for all users).
This is the function prototype:
func SecureJoin(root, unsafePath string) (string, error)
This library guarantees the following:
-
If no error is set, the resulting string must be a child path of
root
and will not contain any symlink path components (they will all be expanded). -
When expanding symlinks, all symlink path components must be resolved relative to the provided root. In particular, this can be considered a userspace implementation of how
chroot(2)
operates on file paths. Note that these symlinks will not be expanded lexically (filepath.Clean
is not called on the input before processing). -
Non-existent path components are unaffected by
SecureJoin
(similar tofilepath.EvalSymlinks
's semantics). -
The returned path will always be
filepath.Clean
ed and thus not contain any..
components.
A (trivial) implementation of this function on GNU/Linux systems could be done
with the following (note that this requires root privileges and is far more
opaque than the implementation in this library, and also requires that
readlink
is inside the root
path):
package securejoin
import (
"os/exec"
"path/filepath"
)
func SecureJoin(root, unsafePath string) (string, error) {
unsafePath = string(filepath.Separator) + unsafePath
cmd := exec.Command("chroot", root,
"readlink", "--canonicalize-missing", "--no-newline", unsafePath)
output, err := cmd.CombinedOutput()
if err != nil {
return "", err
}
expanded := string(output)
return filepath.Join(root, expanded), nil
}
License
The license of this project is the same as Go, which is a BSD 3-clause license
available in the LICENSE
file.