331309 - Bonsai sends email in an unreliable way

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Webtools Graveyard :: Bonsai, defect)

Description

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-5, no longer working on Mozilla)]

This is a problem that we've known about for a while, but I can't find a bug on it (should've filed it at the time; perhaps even did), although it's certainly possible that there is and I can't see it.

The way bonsai sends email is not reliable -- the code in dolog.pl connects to port 25.  Typical sendmail behavior is to stop listening when load on the machine gets too high -- this happened quite often back when we had lots of other things on the same machine as the mozilla.org webtree bonsai instance.  When this happens, the committer simply sees the error message in dolog.pl (alerting him to the fact that the commit was not logged to bonsai).  A malicious person with commit access could use this to sneak in checkins unobserved, especially with a mailbomb or other attack to raise the load on the server and create such a condition.

I consider this a security hole given how much we rely on bonsai to monitor checkins.

This code should be rewritten to use the local mail spool instead of connecting directly to port 25.

Comment 1

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-5, no longer working on Mozilla)]

I filed bug 331310 on the cvsmailfilter.pl script that our cvs server uses, which has the code from dolog.pl copied into it.

Comment 2

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Yeah, this is bug 26839.  But that's not flagged as security, and since you give good ways to kill things in this bug, not sure I should dupe it.

Comment 3

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-5, no longer working on Mozilla)]

Bug 244801 may be related.

Comment 4

[Mike Taylor [:bear]]

changing severity to major so this bubbles to the top of my bonsai todo list

Comment 5

[cls]

Attachment: v1.0

Sometimes you want to avoid using the default mailservers used by the local mailspool so I left in the option to still use smtp via $mailhost.

Comment 6

[cls]

Checking in webtools/bonsai/dolog.pl;
/cvsroot/mozilla/webtools/bonsai/dolog.pl,v  <--  dolog.pl
new revision: 1.24; previous revision: 1.23
done

Comment 7

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

fwiw, (I was just pointed at this bug) that got set back to 0 locally when I installed it on the cvs server, because sendmail is not installed inside the chroot jail (and wouldn't be able to access the system-level mail spool if it was).  Since we run chrooted, we have no choice but to use SMTP to get the mail out.