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Basically what they're saying is that CGI should never have happened.

• anon1385 12y ago
  It goes far beyond CGI. Linux systems use shell scripts all over the place where the data involved may come from untrusted sources. DHCP is one example, but there are many others. If shells can't be trusted not to suddenly execute the data inside variables then shells can't be trusted to do anything.
• vidarh 12y ago
  While that might have been great, the alternative is: People should not have used shells as CGI handlers, and people should (irrespective of CGI) sanitize any environments passed on when spawning other programs from their applications. This latter is really something we should do irrespective of where the input is coming from. Even if the content comes from trusted sources, passing the environment unchanged to sub-processes means we risk all kinds of unintended consequences if an application developers decides to spawn a sub-process that exec's into some process that makes decisions on various variables. It's a bit like letting our applications call functions with random junk in the argument list.
  • regularfry 12y ago
    One thing I've learnt over the years: anything which relies on "people should..." as a basis is doomed.