coredump: split pipe command whitespace before expanding template

Save the offsets of the start of each argument to avoid having to update pointers to each argument after every corename krealloc and to avoid having to duplicate the memory for the dump command. Executable names containing spaces were previously being expanded from %e or %E and then split in the middle of the filename. This is incorrect behaviour since an argument list can represent arguments with spaces. The splitting could lead to extra arguments being passed to the core dump handler that it might have interpreted as options or ignored completely. Core dump handlers that are not aware of this Linux kernel issue will be using %e or %E without considering that it may be split and so they will be vulnerable to processes with spaces in their names breaking their argument list. If their internals are otherwise well written, such as if they are written in shell but quote arguments, they will work better after this change than before. If they are not well written, then there is a slight chance of breakage depending on the details of the code but they will already be fairly broken by the split filenames. Core dump handlers that are aware of this Linux kernel issue will be placing %e or %E as the last item in their core_pattern and then aggregating all of the remaining arguments into one, separated by spaces. Alternatively they will be obtaining the filename via other methods. Both of these will be compatible with the new arrangement. A side effect from this change is that unknown template types (for example %z) result in an empty argument to the dump handler instead of the argument being dropped. This is a desired change as: It is easier for dump handlers to process empty arguments than dropped ones, especially if they are written in shell or don't pass each template item with a preceding command-line option in order to differentiate between individual template types. Most core_patterns in the wild do not use options so they can confuse different template types (especially numeric ones) if an earlier one gets dropped in old kernels. If the kernel introduces a new template type and a core_pattern uses it, the core dump handler might not expect that the argument can be dropped in old kernels. For example, this can result in security issues when %d is dropped in old kernels. This happened with the corekeeper package in Debian and resulted in the interface between corekeeper and Linux having to be rewritten to use command-line options to differentiate between template types. The core_pattern for most core dump handlers is written by the handler author who would generally not insert unknown template types so this change should be compatible with all the core dump handlers that exist.

PWPaul Wise committed 7 years ago