Skip to content

[MEDIUM] M7: exec()-based filesystem pre-warm in user-create path — fork-bomb risk + NC34 fatal #347

Description

@rubenvdlinde

Severity: MEDIUM

Location: lib/Service/SoftwareCatalogue/ContactPersonHandler.php lines 486–507

Description:
The user-create path fires exec("$phpBin -r '...' > /dev/null 2>&1 &") to pre-warm the filesystem for the new user. Two problems:

  1. Fork-bomb via C3: Since convertToUser (C3) is unauthenticated, any caller who triggers repeated user creation will cause this exec to fork an unbounded number of PHP processes in the background.

  2. NC 34 fatal in forked script: The spawned script calls \OC::$server->get(IUserManager::class) — fatal on NC 34 — inside a background process with no error recovery.

Suggested fix:
Replace exec() with a queued NC background job via IJobList::add(). Move the filesystem setup to the job class so it runs asynchronously under the cron worker's lifecycle management.


Source: deep team-reviewer pass 2026-05-27

Activity

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    bugSomething isn't working

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

      Milestone

      No milestone

      Relationships

      None yet

      Development

      No branches or pull requests

      Issue actions