Passed FDs are incorrectly assigned to messages
Submitted by David Herrmann @dvdhrm
Assigned to D-Bus Maintainers
Link to original bug (#101755)
Description
Hi
The dbus specification states:
UNIX_FDS: The number of Unix file descriptors that accompany the message. If omitted, it is assumed that no Unix file descriptors accompany the message. The actual file descriptors need to be transferred via platform specific mechanism out-of-band. They must be sent at the same time as part of the message itself. They may not be sent before the first byte of the message itself is transferred or after the last byte of the message itself.
The spec clearly states that FDs must be sent together with the actual bytes of the message they belong to. However, dbus-daemon does not verify that behavior.
In particular, if you send a message with 1 FD, but UNIX_FDS set to 0, followed by a message with 0 FDs, but UNIX_FDS set to 1, then dbus-daemon will attribute that FD to the second message.
It is not clear whether dbus-daemon behaves incorrectly here. The spec only defines how senders are supposed to work. However, it is very unfortunate that dbus-daemon does not verify that behavior. In particular, either the behavior of dbus-daemon is wanted, in which case the spec is needlessly restricted, or the definition of the spec is what is wanted, then dbus-daemon needs to be fixed.
IOW: Right now, the spec treats the stream of bytes and FDs to be the same stream. But dbus-daemon treats both as two independent streams, where the byte-stream controls when to pop-off elements from the FD stream.
It would be nice if we can clear this up.
Thanks David
Version: git master