[Python-ideas] Fwd: Re: Secure unpickle

[Wes Turner]

* https://github.com/jsonpickle/jsonpickle (keep code and data separate)
* https://pypi.python.org/pypi/dill (IPython)
* https://github.com/zopefoundation/zodbpickle/issues/2 (cwe links)

... Alternatives to unserializing code:
https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/knowledge-engineering#distributed-computing-protocols
#json-ld
On Jul 22, 2015 8:48 PM, "Andrew Barnert via Python-ideas" <
python-ideas at python.org> wrote:

> > On Jul 22, 2015, at 17:27, Neil Girdhar <mistersheik at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Thanks Andrew, totally agree with what you said.  For the record, I
> don't know exactly what the problem is.  I just noticed on some projects
> people talking about writing their own unpickling code because of
> insecurities in pickle, and it made me think: "why should you have to?"
>
> The problem is inherent to the design of pickle: it's a virtual machine
> that can make Python import arbitrary modules and call arbitrary globals
> (with arbitrary literals and/or already-constructed objects as arguments).
> You can't fix that without replacing the whole design. And that's what
> they're asking for in your second link: they want explicit imperative code
> in matplotlib, rather than the data, to drive the process.
>
> Also, the reason pickle is so convenient is that classes can opt in just
> by adding the right methods, but that's the same reason that not
> anticipating everything your code might do can mean an invisible security
> hole instead of a "can't pickle that type" error, so you can't fix that
> either without giving up that convenience.
>
> Of course the other problem is FUD. Despite the fact that there are plenty
> of use cases for which pickle is safe, there are people who would rather
> teach you that it's never ever safe than teach you how to recognize and
> understand potential problems. And there are people who believe pickle is
> slow and space-wasteful and can't handle large data, either because they
> read a blog post from 15 years ago, or because they're still using 2.7 and
> haven't read far enough down the docs page to see that they don't have to
> use format 0. And people who dogmatically insist that all serialization
> formats should be interchange formats (a pickle can only be unpickled by
> the exact same program, or a carefully-updated newer version of the same
> program) even when interchange isn't relevant. And so on. Changing pickle
> wouldn't get rid of the FUD unless you completely replaced it.
>
> So, it might be useful to build a little PyPI module that offered a pickle
> loader that didn't allow new modules to be imported and didn't allow any
> globals to be called except the ones specified in an explicit tuple
> specified in the constructor. But you still have to understand the issues
> to know when that will and won't solve your problems. And it still wouldn't
> satisfy the people posting in those bug reports.
>
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