Bug 1015391

Summary: gnome-online-accounts not validating/sanitising input, goa-daemon continually seg faults if errors present in accounts.conf
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Anthony Horton <anthony.horton>
Component: gnome-online-accountsAssignee: Debarshi Ray <debarshir>
Status: CLOSED EOL QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 19CC: anthony.horton, bnocera, bugzilla, debarshir
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Hardware: Unspecified   
OS: Linux   
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Last Closed: 2015-02-17 17:30:18 UTC Type: Bug
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Description Anthony Horton 2013-10-04 06:00:57 UTC
Description of problem:

gnome-online-accounts is not validating/sanitising the input from the ~/.config/goa-1.0/accounts.conf config file.  If there are errors present in this file such that it contains an incomplete/invalid account description then /usr/libexec/goa-daemon will simply segmentation fault every time accounts.conf is parsed.  It is not straightforward for the end user to recover from this situation because the Online Accounts section of GNOME Settings becomes completely inoperable (empty accounts list with all buttons greyed out) and neither the error notifications ("A problem has been reported with gnome-online-accounts") nor the reports from ABRT ("/usr/libexec/goa-daemon has exited with signal 11 (SIGSEGV)") give much of a clue as to exactly what the problem is.  The only way to recover from this situation is to manually edit/delete the accounts.conf file.

It might be argued that this is an unlikely scenario but this is exactly what happened to me, following a distribution upgrade I somehow ended up with a truncated accounts.conf file that contained only part of an account description.  The whole Online Accounts system was then completely inoperable until I manually deleted the file.  There are many ways in which ordinary files on disk can become corrupted so input from such files should always be validated/sanitised, just because a config file isn't intended to be manually edited doesn't mean you can assume it will only ever contain valid data.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 3.8.3-3.fc19


How reproducible: Always


Steps to Reproduce:
1. Edit ~/.config/goa-1.0/accounts.conf so that it contains an incomplete or invalid account description (or get a disk error to do this for you).
2. Login to GNOME or open the Online Accounts settings.

Actual results:

/usr/libexec/goa-daemon segmentation faults every time ~/.config/goa-1.0/accounts.conf is parsed and the Online Accounts system becomes completely inoperable until the accounts.conf file is manually repaired or removed.


Expected results:

The incomplete/invalid account description is detected, rejected, and reported to the user.  Any complete and valid account descriptions in accounts.conf are processed as normal.  The Online Accounts system continues to work.



Additional info:

Comment 1 Debarshi Ray 2014-04-10 09:18:53 UTC
Do you have a sample accounts.conf that triggers a crash? There are no secret credentials in accounts.conf so it should be safe to attach it.

Comment 2 Fedora End Of Life 2015-01-09 20:06:50 UTC
This message is a notice that Fedora 19 is now at end of life. Fedora 
has stopped maintaining and issuing updates for Fedora 19. It is 
Fedora's policy to close all bug reports from releases that are no 
longer maintained. Approximately 4 (four) weeks from now this bug will
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Comment 3 Fedora End Of Life 2015-02-17 17:30:18 UTC
Fedora 19 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2015-01-06. Fedora 19 is
no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further
security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug.

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Comment 4 Red Hat Bugzilla 2023-09-14 01:51:37 UTC
The needinfo request[s] on this closed bug have been removed as they have been unresolved for 1000 days