[BUG 1.7] Read-only files are not.

David Rothenberger daveroth@acm.org
Thu Jan 1 00:57:00 GMT 2009


On 12/31/2008 4:06 PM, Eric Blake wrote:
> David Rothenberger <daveroth <at> acm.org> writes:
> 
>> It seems that read-only files in Cygwin 1.7 are not truly
>> read-only.
> 
> Are you perchance running as an Administrator, and therefore you have backup 
> privileges?

Yes.

> If so, then you have root-like power, and cygwin exposes that by 
> opening files with intent to backup even when the ACLs would otherwise make the 
> file unreadable.  Therefore, even though none of S_IRUSR, S_IRGRP, S_IROTH are 
> set in the posixy st_mode bits, access(file, R_OK) returns 0 and open() is able 
> to exploit your root-like powers to read that file.
> 
> I thought Corinna mentioned this in the release notes.

I didn't see anything mentioned in this message: 
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-announce/2008-12/msg00009.html

>> (This issue was brought to my attention by a failing subversion test
>> after building for 1.7.)
> 
> The findutils testsuite also had to make accomodations to skip certain tests 
> when run with root-like privileges.

If this is indeed intended behavior, I will adjust the subversion test 
cases accordingly.


-- 
David Rothenberger  ----  daveroth@acm.org

pain, n.:
         One thing, at least it proves that you're alive!


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