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Guidelines for writing trusted software

Signal handling

Signals pose a problem in trusted software because they are not predictable. There are two main areas of concern when it comes to handling signals:

  1. maintaining system integrity when a trusted command receives a signal

  2. use of privilege and special permission inside signal handling functions

If a signal is received by a trusted command, that command must not simply exit and leave the system in an inconsistent or insecure state. If a command contains critical sections that cannot be interrupted, every effort must be made to prevent signals from interrupting those sections.

On the other hand, a signal usually means either that a system problem has occurred (like memory exhaustion, an addressing error, or invalid operation) or that the user has decided to abort the operation. Regardless, it is not correct for a command to continue processing as though nothing had happened.

A system-generated signal usually signifies a flaw in the command and almost certainly means that further processing will be based on corrupt data. A user-generated signal signifies a change of heart by the requesting user and should be honored where possible by restoring the system to the state it was in before the command was invoked. If a command receives a signal after it is committed to a change, the command should finish any steps necessary to ensure consistency and exit.

Attempts to write signal-safe commands must take into account the possibility of unforeseen signals and signals that cannot be caught. On any given system, the set of possible signals is constant, but in general, systems are allowed to have their own implementation-specific signals.

It is better to keep the critical sections of a command as small as possible than to try to protect large critical sections against interruption. This principle means, for example, a command that changes a system database should make all changes on a copy of any sensitive part of the database (for example an index file) before replacing the original. This limits opportunity for an unknown signal to interrupt the sensitive part of the command.

When a trusted command is using privilege or some other extraordinary access and receives a signal, the command may enter a signal handler. Because signals are unpredictable, it is not a good idea for a command to change the privileges or other access attributes of its process inside a signal handler. When the handler returns to the main stream of processing, these attributes must be the same as they were before the signal occurred, or unpredictable processing will result.

Since signal handlers are not allowed to change process attributes, they should never do anything that might take advantage of privileges or special access. In general, a signal handler should set a flag and return or longjump away. Once the flag is set, the command can recognize the signal and respond to it in an orderly fashion.


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