Sublime Forum

Files written to /dev/shm are not private to user

#1

Certain features in sublime_text for Linux (such as the indexing engine) cause sublime to create files in /dev/shm.

Right now, these files appear to have permissions dictated by the default group and umask of the user. On a shared system where users share a group and have umask 0022 or 0027, this means that these files can be read by other users with the same default group. This presents a potential privacy concern.

Could all files written to /dev/shm be written with umask 0077 so that only the user who created them can read them?

0 Likes
#2

Would that not be controlled by the umask that your user profile is setting up? I wold guess that in a nutshell should you want it to be a different mask than you would generally use, you could update the launcher shortcut to something like umask 0077 && sublime_text or similar?

0 Likes
#3

Setting the umask in a wrapper script would fix the protections on these /dev/shm files, but it would prevent sublime_text from creating and saving files with group read permission enabled, which users would generally expect on a system where the default umask is 0022 or 0027.

For example, say we have users A, B, C on our system with default group “shared” and default umask 0027. Users A and B also have a group “admin” and both contribute to an admin directory with permissions 2750 (so new files in the directory automatically get group admin). Right now user A could open sublime and save a new file to the admin directory and it would automatically have group “admin” and group read permission as desired. If we wrapped sublime_text in a script that set the umask to 0077, it would be much more likely that A would create a file intended for B to read but that B can’t actually read.

0 Likes
#4

That’s probably worth an issue.

0 Likes
#5

Thanks! Submitted.

0 Likes