safepath is a function which tries to analyze whether a path is safe to use. Roughly that means that it doesn't resolve in some way that can be controlled by another (non-root) user.
A something similar to this is in TXR Lisp under the name path-components-safe:
I'm not going to sit there claiming it's not vulnerable to anything.
But, assuming it does what it's supposed to, the inherent semantics of the check is supposed to eliminate TOCtoTOU.
The reason is that if we validate, from left to right, that no part of the path is under the control of adversaries, then nothing can happen to that path between the time of check and time of use.
(At least nothing that isn't self-inflicted, which would be outside of the scope. If root checks a path for safety, but root itself has a parallel task going on which changes the permissions or symbolic links in ways that affect the security status of that path, we can regard that as root's self-inflicted problem. That's nearly the same as the ever-present threat that a careless sysadmin might "chmod 777" an sensitive file.)
In fact, development of this function was motivated by exploring the question: can we do security checks on a path in such a way that if the answer is affirmative, it continues to tell the truth moments later, when the same path is accessed?
My objection would be that one (or more) path component(s) could come under the control of an adversary in between the check and the use. Granted it might take a weird set of circumstances -- e.g. a deployment process running in parallel doing odd things with permissions[0] -- but the fundamental problem seems to be essentially unsolvable without kernel support.
It's definitely a great improvement, though.
[0] Which would arguably be a bug with the other process, but this is the world we live in :/
Right. Basically the deployment would have to happen in a secret tree: a directory with a hard to guess name (e.g. 256 bit random hex string) in a root-owned directory that is not readable to anyone but root. Only when the deployment is finalized (all chown and chmod operations have been done) is that tree then renamed to its deployment location.
Whenever root creates an object owned by root, which is then chown-ed to non-root, if an adversary can point a root process at that object, that could subvert safepath.
Just a little thing: Ownership could change from root-to-foo-and-back-again in between Check and Use. We might be talking degenerate cases, again.
... but again^2, probably a huge improvement over ignoring the problem. It will ultimately need OS-API support to avoid these types of issues fully.
As an aside: C++'s filesystem API is (very theoretically) largely unusable due to issues like these. Effectively, almost all of it is UB if even a single other process is doing writes on the filesystem you're accessing.
Tho, to be fair, it's probably an improvement by narrowing how simple it is to exploit relative to doing nothing.