doc_SECURITY_md(3) SECURITY

Files and Environment Variables

system/ pathes are never effected by environment variables. They always use the build-in KDB_DB_SYSTEM path.

user/ pathes, on the other hand, are resolved by: 1.) metadata 'owner', only to be modified by the program 2.) the environment variable USER So in crontab scripts you should have export USER=<your name='' here>=''> so that kdb works (if getlogin does not get the information from somewhere else - which is typically the case on linux systems) 3.) Falls back to user 'test'. So if elektra tries to access e.g. /home/test/.kdb that typically means that USER is not set correctly, use export USER=<name here>=''> in that script. This owner is appended to KDB_DB_HOME.

All files below those pathes might be modified by elektra programs. By making KDB_DB_SYSTEM world-writeable, the users might overwrite the configuration of others.

Compiler Options

Can be changed using standard CMake ways. Some hints:

http://wiki.debian.org/Hardening

Memory Leaks

We use valgrind (--tool=memcheck) to make sure that elektra does not suffer memory leaks and incorrect memory handling.