231938 - Close security/certificate/key *.db files after each use.

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(NSS :: Libraries, defect)

Description

[:aceman]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031216 Firebird/0.7+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031216 Firebird/0.7+

The file mentioned in the summary is open for a very long time while Mozilla is
running, even though it may not be used often. If Mozilla or the OS crashes (or
the computer locks up even on a ultra stable OS), this file may get corrupted.
When this happens, data in this file is lost (partly because Mozilla recreates
corrupt files from scratch). And users may not able to access their profile
(data) anymore.

The point of this bug is a request to close the file after each usage. Ideally
the file should be closed immediatelly, when the operation is done. For
performance, it would be better to close it only after several seconds, but that
may be difficult to code. Maybe it can be left on the OS cache to handle the
frequent opening and closing of the file.

We can try it now in the 1.7 alpha stage.

See bug 231606 for further details on the general problem.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Not security...  Not sure whether this is NSS or PSM.

Comment 2

[Kai Engert [:KaiE:]]

Over to NSS.

The NSS team should decide whether the suggestion is reasonable.

Comment 3

[Wan-Teh Chang]

Bob, could you take a look at this request?

Comment 4

[Robert Relyea]

We've looked into this long ago.

Secdbm is already openned and closed on when when used.
Certdb and keydb are not because of performance reasons. This should not be a
problem because NSS syncs write after the writes.

Database corruption does not happen because Mozilla crashes with the DB's open,
they get corrupted if more than one application accesses them at the same time.
The solution is multiaccess databases.

Comment 5

[:aceman]

There are files, that are corrupted because Mozilla crashes with them open.
I haven't seen a corruption of the .db files yet, as you say too.
I am just advertising a cleanup of open files.

But I accept your explanation and closing of this bug.

Will reopen if I see a corruption caused by exactly this problem.

Thanks