marshal vs pickle

[Aaron Watters]

On Nov 1, 11:42 pm, Paul Rubin <http://phr...@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote:
> Aaron Watters <aaron.watt... at gmail.com> writes:
> > >   >>> marshal.loads('RKp,U\xf7`\xef\xe77\xc1\xea\xd8\xec\xbe\\')
> > >   Segmentation fault
> > >...
> > I'll grant you the above as a denial of service attack. ...
> > Can you give me an example
> > where someone can erase the filesystem using marshal.load?
>
> You should always assume that if an attacker can induce a memory fault
> (typically through a buffer overflow) then s/he can inject and run
> arbitrary machine code ...

Yes yes yes, but this takes an extraordinary amount of skill
and criminal malice.  With pickle an innocent person
on another continent could potentially delete all the files
on your computer by accident.

In summary my view is this.

  - pickle is way too complicated and not worth the
    extra overhead and danger in most cases.

  - marshal is an excellent tool for getting
    large amounts of data in and out of Python that
    can be much faster than pickle and is always
    much less dangerous than pickle.  I think it's safe
    enough for most RPC uses, for example.

  - It's a damn shame that the Python developers
    can't be bothered to make marshal portable across
    platforms and versions.  It's a silly mistake.

Sorry for all the fuss.

   -- Aaron Watters

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