use of exec()

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 2:00 AM, lars van gemerden <lars at rational-it.com> wrote:
> I get your point, since in this case having the custom code option makes the system a whole lot less complex and flexible, i will leave the option in. The future customer will be informed that they should handle the security around the designers as if they were programmers. Aditionally i will probably add some screening for unwanted keywords (like 'import') and securely log any new/changed custom code including the designer account (must do that for other actions anyway).

That sounds like a reasonable implementation of Layer Eight security.
As long as everyone understands that this code can do ANYTHING, you'll
be fine.

You may want to add some other programmatic checks, though; for
instance, a watchdog timer in case the code gets stuck in an infinite
loop, or a memory usage limit, or somesuch. Since you're no longer
worrying about security, this sort of thing will be fairly easy, and
will be just to help catch common errors.

ChrisA