bugs in pam_env

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Hi,

I found some errors and unexpected/confusing behaviour in pam_env.


1)

The user environment file is not parsed with the correct function, but it is parsed as a configuration file. This means that DEFAULT and OVERRIDE are recognized as special words and that parameter expansion is done.

Please see pam_env.c at line 826.

The parsing seems to work just because of unexpected behaviour #4 below (that is, also in config file the syntax "variable=value" is honored, even if because of an error.)


2)

From what I understand, setting DEFAULT= deletes a variable if OVERRIDE is empty or non-existing. But with some configuration combinations you get inconsistent behaviour:

this_variable_is_removed
this_one_is_removed_too DEFAULT=
this_one_is_removed_as_well OVERRIDE="" DEFAULT=
also_this_one_is_removed DEFAULT= OVERRIDE=
but_this_one_is_added_as_empty_var OVERRIDE= DEFAULT=

This happens because in pam_env.c, in function _parse_line, variable quoteflg is not properly handled (more specifically, it is decremented even when it shouldn't).


3)

I don't know if it is a bug or not, but it's most definitely unexpected.
If in the env file I write:

export a=1

it works. But:

export  b=2   # note that there are two spaces
export    c=3 # note that there is a TAB character

do not work. The parser in _parse_env_file (pam_env.c:220) does not handle anything different from a single space.


4)

If in conf file I write:

variable
# or
variable DEFAULT=

the expected behaviour is to remove that variable from the environment. But the parser does not check for '=' signs, so if have this in the conf file (NOT in the env file):

this_does_not_do_what_expected=yeah
# or even this:
neither_does_this=ohyeah!     DEFAULT=

the module tries to remove the variable "this_does_not_do_what_expected=yeah" from the environment (as per debug log: remove variable "this_does_not_do_what_expected=yeah"), but it results in adding the variable "this_does_not_do_what_expected" instead, with value = "yeah".

Note that this is the reason why the parsing of the user environment file seems to work.


5)

The '#' char is recognized as comment even if it's not the first non-blank character in the line (differently from what written in the man page).
Especially, a conf line like this one:

variable DEFAULT="a#b"

does not work, it results in an error (Unterminated quoted string: "a). If not supported, this should be at least mentioned in the manual.
Note that the same problem is in the env file, because the line parsing function is the same (_assemble_line).


6)

pam_env.c:74:
/* This is a flag used to designate an empty string */
static char quote='Z';

but in function check_var (row 511):
    if (&quote == var->defval) {
      /*
       * This means that the empty string was given for defval value
       * which indicates that a variable should be defined with no value
       */
      *var->defval = '\0';

as it can be seen, the last line changes the value of quote. This does not seem to have ill effects, but it is not nice because quote becomes = '\0', which has also a special meaning different from quote itself (quote means the empty quoted string, '\0' means the empty unquoted string).


7)

the "_parse_env_file" function in pam_env.c gets lines using function "_assemble_line", but then repeats a lot of the checks that have already been done (comments, empty lines, whitespaces at the beginning, ...)


Regards
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