Trusted vs Unstrusted MIME types

[Thomas Leonard]

On Sat, 07 Jul 2007 00:42:11 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-07-06 at 11:21 -0400, Christopher Aillon wrote:
[...]
>> Boris makes a good point.  We definitely don't want users to "open" 
>> executables such as perl scripts with an interpreter as that is an easy 
>> way for an attacker to do things to an unwary user's system.  We need 
>> some way to discern untrusted from trusted content.
>> 
>> Looks like epiphany is doing this via 
>> http://svn.gnome.org/viewcvs/epiphany/trunk/data/mime-types-permissions.xml?revision=7005&view=markup
>> 
>> I'd argue that we should consider moving this information to fd.o, 
>> perhaps into s-m-i itself.  I'm not sure we need a separate XML file for 
>> it, though.  Perhaps we could integrate this directly into the existing 
>> XML file?
> 
> I'd be all for having this XML file's data available. Marking
> untrustworthy mime-type wouldn't that much of a problem for our
> implementation (apart from the ABI breakage of the cache).

How can a type be "safe" or "unsafe"? Safeness depends on the application.
E.g. a python script is safe if you open it with a text editor, but not if
you use a python interpreter.

Perhaps applications that are designed to handle untrusted data safely
could be flagged as such in their .desktop files?


-- 
Dr Thomas Leonard		http://rox.sourceforge.net
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