[Twisted-Python] pb.Copyable, round trip objects, and untrusted clients

Christopher Armstrong radix at twistedmatrix.com
Thu May 20 01:33:09 EDT 2004


David Ripton wrote:
> There's a third hole to plug, which is passing an object from the server 
> to the client as an argument of a client-side remote_* method, and later 
> getting it back as an argument to a server-side perspective_* method. 
> (e.g. the server passes the client a list of games in progress, and 
> later the client passes back the game it wants to join.)  If the client 
> changes the object before passing it back, it might trick the server 
> into doing the wrong thing with it.
> 
> Anyway, it seems easy enough to avoid this problem, by just rewinding 
> any changes the client has made to such objects.  At some point before 
> sending an object to the client side, add it to a dict, keyed by its id. 
>  When an object comes back from the client as an argument in a 
> perspective_* call, use its id to lookup the server's copy of the object 
> in the dict, and then reassign the current name to the good version of 
> the object, losing any changes the client may have made.  In other 
> words, the client is treated as if it only passed the object's id back, 
> not its __dict__.  But the interface is simpler.

It sounds like the client ought to just pass a string (e.g., the name of 
the game) or something representing the game it wants to play. IOW, 
whether it's a string or not, something that isn't possible to be munged 
in a way that would "mess up" the server in the first place.

-- 
  Twisted | Christopher Armstrong: International Man of Twistery
   Radix  |          Release Manager,  Twisted Project
---------+           http://radix.twistedmatrix.com/
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