49507 - psm does not work, when run as a different user in unix. (causes hang/freeze)

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Core Graveyard :: Security: UI, defect, P4)

Description

[nitinp]

-install psm and netscape 6 as yourself or as root.
-login as someone else, and run netscape 6.0 as this user , using the netscape6 
of the user.
-netscape 6.0 will launch but psm does not work. You cannot do any SSL or even 
open the SA.

Comment 1

[Goro Nishimura]

This problem comes from creation of xpti.dat and xptitemp.dat in psm/components
directory owned by root.
The creation of them is not follow the UNIX permission scheme.
This problem appears both of mozilla-M17 and netscape v6PR2 on Linux.

Comment 2

[John Unruh]

*** Bug 50491 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 3

[Michael La Guardia]

David, this seems to be lower priority to me.  Marking [nsbeta3+] to take it off
the untriaged list, but setting priority to 4 to indicate that this is lower
priority.

Comment 4

[David Krause]

See also bug 32188 and bug 36007.  Fixing 32188 could fix this one and the other
one possibly. Although the RSA patent expiring make all these bugs moot when PSM
is integrated.

Comment 5

[David P. Drinan]

This bug should be fixed with the latest PSM xpi file.

Comment 6

[John Unruh]

Reopening. 
1.) Install the 9/20 netscape-i686-pc-linux-gnu-installer.tar.gz build as root.
2.) Login as another user and start netscape.
What happens: I cannot reach an https site, and psm never starts up. Also 
component.reg is owned by root and is read only.

Comment 7

[Javier Delgadillo]

leaf, 

I think this can be solved if we pre-generate the component.reg file for PSM.

1 question directly for you:  How can we do that?

Another question: Can we get PDT to review this bug?  This is a major bug that 
IMHO must be fixed for PR3.

Comment 8

[Daniel (Leaf) Nunes]

does psm have it's own component registration? that is, does there need to be a
components/psm/component.reg?

If so, we have to hack the build automation (the stuff that builds psm) to
either run psm once to generate this file, or run regxpcom (which is what we use
to generate mozilla's component.reg).

Comment 9

[lchiang]

per PDT: P3-P5 priority bugs changed from nsbeta3+ to nsbeta3- since we have
more important work to do for Seamonkey. If you disagree, please state your case
in the bug report and nominate for rtm. Thanks.

Perhaps we need to release note this?  Is this bug prioritized correctly?

Comment 10

[timeless]

Definately relnote.  As for rtm if this is just a mess due to component.reg and 
if we end up bundling psm then I think this would be fixed by rtm. If we don't 
then either this is eaily fixed in which case it should get rtm or it isn't in 
which case it should get relnotertm+arch.

leaf or ddrinan?

Comment 11

[Sitsofe Wheeler]

I think this bug is underated. The current fix (make the directory world
writeable) could be viewed as a security hole and anyone who tries to use
hotmail will encounter this bug...

Comment 12

[Timothy Cole]

Underrated is something of an understatement.  I couldn't deploy this in a
multi-user environment with a world-writable directory, at least not in good
conscience.

Comment 13

[Christopher Blizzard (:blizzard)]

I made a post in .security about how to work around this problem.  It should
help people in the mean time.

Comment 14

[Sitsofe Wheeler]

Deja news link to blizzard's post
http://x63.deja.com/[ST_rn=fs]/threadmsg_ct.xp?thitnum=1&AN=681062626.1&mhitnum=0&CONTEXT=971793682.243859504

Does anyone have a precompiled version of psm with this fix in it?

Comment 15

[John Unruh]

*** Bug 58287 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 16

[John Unruh]

rtm

Comment 17

[John Unruh]

*** Bug 53598 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 18

[John Unruh]

*** Bug 59516 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 19

[John Unruh]

Joel Becker ([e-mail]) reports that the application hangs when run as 
a different user.

Comment 20

[John Unruh]

*** Bug 59516 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 21

[Andreas Franke (gone)]

This is a Bad Bug (TM). There have been complaints about this on the newsgroups,
and I can easily reproduce the freeze in our NS6.0 installation:
1. Run netscape as a regular user
2. Load https://www.verisign.com -> throbber activates, but nothing else happens
3. Click the Stop button -> freeze

It seems to be a deadlock between CMT_EstablishControlConnection () in thread 3
and PR_EnterMonitor () in thread 2. Stack traces follow as attachments.

OS->Linux (because that's a supported OS), Severity->critical, crash keyword.
Nominating for moz0.9.

Comment 22

[Andreas Franke (gone)]

Attachment: stack trace, thread 3

Comment 23

[Andreas Franke (gone)]

Attachment: stack trace, thread 2

Comment 24

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 60792 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 25

[R.K.Aa.]

*** Bug 61102 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 26

[John Unruh]

*** Bug 61276 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 27

[John Unruh]

*** Bug 61600 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 28

[Tim Taylor]

*** Bug 62257 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 29

[Tim Taylor]

Attachment: workaround

Comment 30

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Excerpt of "workaround" (attached above): Make the psm install dir writeable for
all users. Not that elegant (but it would surely work).

Comment 31

[mental]

Ben, unless I gravely misunderstand what goes in the psm directory, that
workaround opens the door to any user tampering with the PSM components.  This
is software that may handle e.g. financially important or confidential data,
after all.

The workaround is dangerous, makes SSL effectively completely insecure against
local users, and is not suitable for anything but single-user, standalone,
workstations.

Comment 32

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

> The workaround is dangerous

That's what I tried to say, yes. It wasn't my proposal.

Comment 33

[timeless]

Ok, how about a really silly variation on workaround. peruser psm.
admin installs psm. makes it readonly for all relevant users, and then moves it 
to psm.bin/
Then the admin creates a symlink from psm to ~/mozilla/plugins/psm
then the admin creates a shell script or something that creates 
~/mozilla/plugins/psm and performs magic on psm.bin/ and that directory.

We had an old script that did something similar for entire distributions.  I'm 
sure someone still has it.

Recommended magic: mirroring directory structure and symlinking each file in 
the directory structure. 

Comment 34

[Sitsofe Wheeler]

I'm not sure whether Timeless' solution will work if multiple users are running
 mozilla on the same machine at the same time (as happens here)...

Comment 35

[Joel Becker]

Forgive me for asking this question, as I don't have all the internals knowledge
required to know this on my own, but it would seem to me that the normal
solution applies.  All the executable/generic bits go in the psm dir, and the
user's database/prefs go in ~/.mozilla/psm.  Is there a major problem with such
a solution?

Comment 36

[timeless]

Sitsofe Wheeler: please try. It should. if it doesn't then we have another 
serious bug separate from this one.

Joel Becker: http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/security/psm/ has all of the 
internals. I can't speak for the authors, but as is PSM does not do what is 
required to be well behaved, and therefore, we have this bug.

I recommend that we use this bug to discuss workarounds and that people file 
specific bugs for the specific problems.

Comment 37

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

I thought, we had a workaround - blizzard's Jedimindtrick - not?

Comment 38

[Javier Delgadillo]

The problem was in the followin function:

http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/security/psm/lib/nlslayer/nlslayer.cpp#69

When starting up, PSM always called nsComponentManager::AutoRegister which tried
to create the components.reg file.

I'm working on getting PSM into Linux nightlies, which will build the new
version of nlslayer.cpp at which point this bug should go away.

Comment 39

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 63356 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 40

[thomasz]

Congratulations to the Netscrap managers who have pushed out Netscape 6. You
have have made a bad joke of Netscape and the Mozilla project. I hope that
Microsoft will release Internet Explorer for Un*x soon; a world writeable psm
installation is worse security nightmare than ActiveX!

Comment 41

[John Unruh]

*** Bug 64131 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 42

[Javier Delgadillo]

This should work now that PSM shares the components registry with mozilla.

Please re-open if that's not the case.

Comment 43

[R.K.Aa.]

The Install routine from Debug menu still doesn't work on linux trunk build
2001010821. Is that supposed to work?
I'm asking because i have a growing hunch that the real testing is being done on
PSM 1.4 and maybe some commerical mozilla build not publically available.
The bugs i've "suffered" from regarding PSM are as alive today as they ever
were. (like bug 56366).

Comment 44

[John Unruh]

Here is a build of mozilla with psm built in, and it works. Nightly builds of 
mozilla on www.mozilla.org presently are missing psm due to build problems.
www.concentric.net/~unruh/mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz

Comment 45

[timeless]

nightly builds should now include psm [which is newer than the psm from 
debug>install psm]

Comment 46

[Javier Delgadillo]

PSM now gets built as part of the daily builds for Mozilla.

If you use a version from one of the daily builds, this will not be a problem.
You shouldn't have to do a separate download anymore either.  (I believe there
are already bugs open for packaging problems, but I don't remember them off the
top of my head.)

Comment 47

[R.K.Aa.]

well yes... the installation happened, and very quick, so something was in the
2001010821 build that wasn't there before.
It's just that PSM hangs when used as normal user. (I installed as root)
So the old problem persists, and mozilla freezes when i click "stop" button, and
has to be killed. Will d/l the one pointed to here and test.

Comment 48

[R.K.Aa.]

downloading mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu-sea.tar.gz from the lates dir (2001010908)
and then used debug/install as root, to install it. Found this:
PSM is installed. It happens way quicker than usual - in seconds rather than the
usual 30 minutes (i use a modem) - meaning the PSM stuff is bundled in the
downloaded tar.gz and not downloaded via web.

When i afterwards start moz as normal user, and go to a https site, PSM does NOT
start. Never spawns a single thread. mozilla-bin just hangs there, browser
window spinning... end of story. If I then click stop, mozilla will freeze and
has to be killed. I tried this at two different sites with same result.

This bugs summary reads:
"psm does not work, when run as a different user in unix. (causes hang/freeze)"

That is still the situation. It is not fixed.

This is how the file attributes look - are they correct? It is unusual that .so
files arent executable, like here,  but they may be that packaging problem
Javier refer to, since they are all older versions of .so files already present
AND exectuable in other browser directories:

ls -la /usr/local/mozilla/psm
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root       125976 Sep 22 11:29 libz.so
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root       952970 Sep 22 16:02 libxpcom.so
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         9285 Sep 22 16:02 libplds4.so
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root        15980 Sep 22 16:02 libplc4.so
-rwxrwxr-x    1 root     root         1555 Sep 22 16:03 start-psm
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root      1324981 Sep 22 16:03 psm
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root       211976 Sep 22 16:03 libnspr4.so
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root       123270 Sep 22 16:04 component.reg
drwxr-xr-x    4 root     root         4096 Jan  9 13:47 psmdata
drwxrwxr-x   10 root     root         4096 Jan  9 13:47 ..
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root         4096 Jan  9 13:47 components
drwxr-xr-x    4 root     root         4096 Jan  9 13:47 .

ls -la /usr/local/mozilla/psm/components
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root         4096 Jan  9 13:47 .
drwxr-xr-x    4 root     root         4096 Jan  9 13:47 ..
-rw-rw-rw-    1 root     root       923891 Sep 22 16:04 libnecko.so
-rw-rw-rw-    1 root     root       124553 Sep 22 16:04 libnslocale.so
-rw-rw-rw-    1 root     root        65416 Sep 22 16:04 libstrres.so
-rw-rw-rw-    1 root     root       152343 Sep 22 16:04 libuconv.so
-rw-rw-rw-    1 root     root       231634 Sep 22 16:04 libucvlatin.so
-rw-rw-rw-    1 root     root        73081 Sep 22 16:04 libunicharutil.so
-rw-rw-rw-    1 root     root          108 Sep 22 16:04 xpti.dat
-rw-rw-rw-    1 root     root          108 Jan  9 14:08 xptitemp.dat

Comment 49

[R.K.Aa.]

might add: Downloading junruh's build and using moz as the user i installed as,
works OK. The psm directory structure is different in that build btw... ie. it
IS no directory - psm and start-psm reside directly in the package dir, not in a
subdir called psm.

Comment 50

[John Unruh]

[e-mail]: With the build you downloaded, which is now available at 
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/latest/mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.
gz,
don't go to iPlanet and download PSM, it already comes with the mozilla build 
now. The PSM from the iPlanet download site does not work with the latest 
nightly builds. Please delete your last installation and reinstall the build of 
mozilla that you downloaded.

Comment 51

[R.K.Aa.]

I am using an installed build, as run by running ./mozilla-installer provided in
mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu-sea.tar.gz

Once that is installed, there IS no psm executable nor psm dir.
Is it hidden in some chrome, waiting to be lured out somehow?
In that case: how?
I deleted/reinstalled and now i just get "connection refused" when trying to go
to https sites, both as root and normal user.

Comment 52

[R.K.Aa.]

sorry: Meant to ask if it's lurking in some jar file but not unpacked by
default? It has gotta be there somehow - it used to take 30 minutes downloading
it when i ran Debug/Install PSM. Now it would take seconds, so it unpacks from
local disk somehow. But how to i force this to happen?

Comment 53

[Andreas Franke (gone)]

[e-mail]: You are not supposed to do "Debug/Install PSM" any more. It should
just work "out of the box". The build comments for the Jan 5th nightly say that
the .tar.gz has PSM built-in, and when I downloaded that build, unpacked that as
a regular user (not as root), and then ran it as that same user, https sites
were loading fine without any further action.

Comment 54

[R.K.Aa.]

Can someone please tell whether the installer-builds are supposed to contain PSM?

Comment 55

[Tom Mraz]

Yes it will work as soon as the bug 64649 is fixed.

Comment 56

[Daniel (Leaf) Nunes]

the tar.gz, non-installer packages have psm included. as the previous comment 
alludes, the installer needs to be fixed before installer builds have psm.

Comment 57

[John Unruh]

Verified fixed with the nightly linux build.
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/latest/mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.
gz

Comment 58

[John Unruh]

*** Bug 36007 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 59

[John Unruh]

Mass changing Security:Crypto to PSM

Comment 60

[John Unruh]

Mass changing Security:Crypto to PSM