Christian, Rami and Steven, thank you all for your help. It wasn't meant to be a challenge, I knew it ought to be easily breakable. I'm no hacker and it just helps to have some examples to better understand the issue.
On Aug 20, 7:42 pm, Steven D'Aprano <st...@remove- > On a related topic, you should read this post here: > http://tav.espians.com/a-challenge-to-break-python-security.html Indeed I did read the post and my minimalistic test was inspired by some of the code in it (I didn't know you could replace the builtins!). Tav's effort kinda of ended nowhere though. My understanding of it is that it hasn't been broken and that Tav has submitted a patch to secure some of python's innards. But Steven, you are perfectly right, I didn't test it and I missed the crucial part in which I store the __builtins__ dictionary in the dictionary of the new originalBuiltins module. My bad. Still, you did understand my intentions and did give me a simple example of how it could be broken. Thank you. -However- I would suggest that conceptually the "award" goes to Christian. ;) In the same way the open builtin function can be replaced or removed, also reload, file, __import__, exec, execfile and any other potentially "unsafe" builtin can be replaced with safer versions. Or not? Christian's solution though, seems to be much trickier to evade. Can the object class be replaced at runtime with a version that does not provide a way to reach its subclasses? Manu -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
