818410 - certutil -S writes temporary files unnecessarily

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(NSS :: Tools, defect)

Description

[Brian Smith (:briansmith, :bsmith, use NEEDINFO?)]

Attachment: Stop requiring the current working directory to be writable for certutil -S

certutil -S ${ARGS} is approximately equivalent to:

certutil -R ${ARGS} -o tempcertreq
certutil -C ${ARGS} -i tempcertreq -o tempcert
certutil -A ${ARGS} -i tempcert

In particular, certutil will create two temporary files, named "tempcertreq" and "tempcert" in the current working directory. This means that you must run "certutil -S" from a writable directory. This requirement is one of the things that makes it difficult to adapt the NSS test suite to run on Android using ADB (vs. ssh).

This patch changes certutil to avoid creating the temporary files; instead, the data that would have been written to those temporary files is passed in a buffer in memory.

Comment 1

[Elio Maldonado]

The naive approach would have been to write to a file to a temporary directory where there would be write access but that may not be cross-platform. This request is to not write temporary files unnecessarily which is much better. Reviewing it as such.

Comment 2

[Brian Smith (:briansmith, :bsmith, use NEEDINFO?)]

Thanks for the review Elio!

Checking in cmd/certutil/certutil.c;
/cvsroot/mozilla/security/nss/cmd/certutil/certutil.c,v  <--  certutil.c
new revision: 1.165; previous revision: 1.164
done