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by sgtnoodle
796 days ago
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Given that it's shared memory based, it seems like there has to be some degree of trust that the participants are well behaved. What do you mean by a malformed message, though? If you're talking about the payload of the message, that seems like a matter of the message scheme you're using. If you're talking about correctness of the IPC protocol itself, integrity checking is unfortunately at odds with latency. |
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That said, I'll add that my Manual (https://flow-ipc.github.io/doc/flow-ipc/versions/main/genera...) gets into the topic of safety (with a few words on how this differs from security; this indeed involves trust). So indeed Flow-IPC does not attempt to provide security for malicious/untrusted conversation-partner -- but it does provide a few enabled-by-default safety mechanisms. The Manual page in question: https://flow-ipc.github.io/doc/flow-ipc/versions/main/genera...
Among other things, the capnp-layer (which, as I noted in a recent reply earlier, is optional to use -- you can and sometimes certainly should "just" go native, and/or combine the two approaches) uses an internally-generated token to ensure some kind of terrible bug/thing/problem/act-of-god isn't mis-routing messages. It's a safety mechanism.
But in terms of, say, incompatible schemas or mis-matching native `struct`s -- what if you used different compilers with slightly different STLs on the 2 sides?! -- it is indeed on the developer to not make that error/not converse with untrusted code. Flow-IPC will guard against misuses to the extent it's reasonable though, IMO.
P.S. [Internal impl note] Oh! And, although at the moment it is the protocol version v1 (for all internally-involved protocols at all layers), I did build-in a protocol-version-checking system from the start, so as to avoid shooting ourselves in the foot, in case Flow-IPC needs to expand some of its internal protocol(s) in later versions. At the very worst, Flow-IPC would refuse to establish a channel/session upon encountering a partner with Flow-IPC version such that their protocols are incompatible. (Again -- academic at the moment, since there is only v1 -- but might be different in the future. At that point a new protocol might be developed to be backward-compatible with earlier-Flow-IPCs and just still work; or worst case throw the aforementioned error if not.)