rfc:taint

Differences

This shows you the differences between two versions of the page.

Link to this comparison view

Both sides previous revisionPrevious revision
Next revisionBoth sides next revision
rfc:taint [2008/07/06 23:04] – wietserfc:taint [2008/07/06 23:06] – wietse
Line 128: Line 128:
 Taint support is implemented with some of the unused bits in the zval data structure. The zval is the PHP equivalent of a memory cell. Besides a type (string, integer, etc.) and value, each zval has a reference count and a flag that says whether the zval is a reference to yet another zval that contains the actual value. Taint support is implemented with some of the unused bits in the zval data structure. The zval is the PHP equivalent of a memory cell. Besides a type (string, integer, etc.) and value, each zval has a reference count and a flag that says whether the zval is a reference to yet another zval that contains the actual value.
  
-Right now I am using eight bits, but there is room for more: 32-bit UNIX compilers such as GCC add 16 bits of padding to the current zval data structure, and this amount of padding isn't going to be smaller on 64-bit architectures; Microsoft Visual Studio 6 also adds 16 bits of padding when it builds the Win32 binaries. If I really have to squeeze the taint bits in-between the existing bits, the taint support performance hit goes up. If squeezing is necessary, all PHP code will need to be changed to use official initialization macros, so that expensive shift/mask operations can be avoided as much as possible.+Right now I am using eight bits, but there is room for more: 32-bit UNIX compilers such as GCC add 16 bits of padding to the current zval data structure, and this amount of padding isn't going to be smaller on 64-bit architectures; Microsoft Visual Studio 6 also adds 16 bits of padding when it builds PHP on a Win32 platform. If I really have to squeeze the taint bits in-between the existing bits, the taint support performance hit goes up. If squeezing is necessary, all PHP code will need to be changed to use official initialization macros, so that expensive shift/mask operations can be avoided as much as possible.
  
 The preliminary configuration user interface is rather low-level, somewhat like MS-DOS file permissions :-( This is good enough for testing and debugging the taint support itself, but I would not want to have wires hanging out of the machine like this forever. The raw bits will need to be encapsulated so that applications can work with meaningful names and abstractions. The preliminary configuration user interface is rather low-level, somewhat like MS-DOS file permissions :-( This is good enough for testing and debugging the taint support itself, but I would not want to have wires hanging out of the machine like this forever. The raw bits will need to be encapsulated so that applications can work with meaningful names and abstractions.
rfc/taint.txt · Last modified: 2017/09/22 13:28 by 127.0.0.1

Page Tools