Revised and committed as 1.0.

[~andy/fetchmail] / design-notes.html

diff --git a/design-notes.html b/design-notes.html
index ffd82bf80f746b2ea9b0d6ac41cb7819a1dc4adb..71b259058965863fa047477f64a4438b39309245 100644 (file)
--- a/design-notes.html
+++ b/design-notes.html
@@ -17,7 +17,7 @@
 <table width="100%" cellpadding="0" summary="Canned page header">
 <tr>
 <td width="30%">Back to <a href="index.html">Fetchmail Home Page</a></td>
-<td width="30%" align="right">$Date: 2003/02/28 11:26:47 $</td>
+<td width="30%" align="right">$Date$</td>
 </tr>
 </table>
 
@@ -33,9 +33,26 @@ ESR made previously, and the differences and new directions will be laid
 out in this document. It is therefore a sort of a TODO document, until
 the necessary code revisions have been made.</p>
 
+<h2>Security</h2>
+
+<p>Fetchmail was handed over in a pretty poor shape, security-wise. It will
+happily talk to the network with root privileges, use sscanf() to read
+remotely received data into fixed-length stack-based buffers without
+length limitation and so on. A full audit is required and security
+concepts will have to be applied. Random bits are:</p>
+
+<ul>
+    <li>code talking to the network does not require root privileges and
+    needs to run without root permissions</li>
+    <li>all input must be validated, all strings must be length checked,
+    all integers range checked</li>
+    <li>all types will need to be reviewed whether they are signed or
+    unsigned</li>
+</ul>
+
 <h2>SMTP forwarding</h2>
 
-<p>Fetchmails multidrop and rewrite options will process addresses
+<p>Fetchmail's multidrop and rewrite options will process addresses
 received from remote sites. Special care must be taken so these
 features cannot be abused to relay mail to foreign sites.</p>
 
@@ -101,7 +118,7 @@ upstream were the same as the IMAP or POP3 server.</p>
 <table width="100%" cellpadding="0" summary="Canned page footer">
 <tr>
 <td width="30%">Back to <a href="index.html">Fetchmail Home Page</a></td>
-<td width="30%" align="right">$Date: 2003/02/28 11:26:47 $</td>
+<td width="30%" align="right">$Date$</td>
 </tr>
 </table>