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by ryanjshaw 1183 days ago
Not sure how you came to this conclusion in this particular case. File APIs have been around for decades, and are well understood.

Changing the behaviour of a file mode from truncate to not-truncate is a questionable decision because these are very explicit options a developer would carefully select, and therefore would not expect to see a change in behaviour to something already covered by a different option.

I work in finance and I can confidently say it would be at the top of my mind that this kind of change would result in leaking data or corrupting data because I regularly explicitly choose truncation to avoid exactly that when I generate new reports.

It's also ironic that you complain about hyperbole then accuse people of "pretending to be smart". You don't need to be smart to see this as a security issue, you just need some real world development experience.
1 comments
progval 1183 days ago
> Changing the behaviour of a file mode from truncate to not-truncate is a questionable decision

Looking at the commit which changed this behavior: https://cs.android.com/android/_/android/platform/frameworks...

it seems like it was a refactoring gone wrong, and not a conscious decision to change the behaviour.

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ryanjshaw 1183 days ago
Nice find. You may be correct that it wasn't intentional due to the lack of documentation around the change, but I do note they updated tests for the refactored function [1], and the tests clearly show different behaviour from the original implementation [2].

I'm surprised this wasn't picked up during code review. Also surprised no unit tests for the original implementation, just the new one - if you're going to refactor something, add tests for the original implementation if there aren't any already.

[1] https://cs.android.com/android/_/android/platform/frameworks...

[2] https://cs.android.com/android/_/android/platform/frameworks...

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hgsgm 1181 days ago
Who gets promoted faster: The person who spends an extra hour or two on every code review investigating the behavior of hacky wrappers 50-year-old awkward file APIs, looking for the one and 100 critical security bug? Or The person who gets more features launched?
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