[Psi-devel] Opening downloaded files in a safe way

[James Chaldecott]

Hello again everyone. Yes, I'm still lurking on here! :-)

First: Wow! I must have just read about that API when I mentioned it before.
If you hadn't mentioned my name I would have sworn I'd never heard of it!
:-)

That said, I read the MSDN docs as saying that Save/Execute themselves don't
delete the file, but they do invoke the system virus scanner, which might.
That implies that files will only be deleted if a) the user's anti-virus
app thinks they are a virus and b) the user has set the anti-virus app to
"delete immediately" (or similar).

Do people generally run their systems like that? The default is usually
"Quarantine", isn't it?

Anyway, if the user has asked that all infected files are deleted as soon as
they are seen, then shouldn't Psi respect that choice? If a file is deleted
by the virus scanner, presumably it will tell the user, so if Psi has worked
around that deletion it would actually be counter-intuitive, IMHO.

Interesting (but rare) edge case to consider:
The user has anti-virus options set to "delete immediately". Psi saves an
(infected) transferred file (or part of one) in a temp folder, but an
anti-virus system scan scans that folder while it is there. The anti-virus
will delete the file out from underneath Psi, won't it? Nothing we can do
about that.

If users get annoyed with the virus scanner deleting their stuff, they'll
just set it to"Quarantine" and go and get the file out of Quarantine
afterwards (I'd hope).

£0.02

James

On 07/12/06, Norman Rasmussen <norman at rasmussen.co.za> wrote:
>
> On 12/7/06, Maciek Niedzielski <machekku at uaznia.net> wrote:
> > So... please say something smart... And I'm going to sleep...
>
> > * I'm not 100% sure if CheckPolicy() != don't open guarantees that
> > Execute()/Save() won't automatically delete the file.
>
> If the file is read-only does it get deleted?
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.affinix.com/pipermail/psi-devel-affinix.com/attachments/20061207/ad82e96c/attachment.htm