DMD 1.005 release [security concerns about ImportExpressions]

[Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email)]

Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Tue, 06 Feb 2007 06:54:18 +0200, Walter Bright <newshound at digitalmars.com> wrote:
> 
>> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/changelog.html
> 
> Hmm. What would prevent someone from writing programs like:
>    writef(import("/etc/passwd"));
> and trick someone to compile this program for them (under the pretext that they don't have a D compiler, for example) to steal the user list (or the contents of any other file with a known absolute or relative path on the victim's system)?
> 
> IMO, the compiler should at least issue a warning when importing a file not located in/under the source file's directory. Although, if the source emits a lot of pragma(msg) messages, the warning might get cluttered by those - or this might be concealed in a large program with a lot of files. A better security-wise solution is to disallow importing files outside the source file's directory, unless specified by the user on the command-line.

How would the bad person see the output of the compilation?

Andrei