WebAssembly / WebAssembly/WASI

Support for user-only permissions

Open
#760 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

P-filesystem S-inactive
Dominant language
Rust
Stars
5.8k
Forks
333
Avg merge
2d 13h
Merged PRs (30d)
3

Description

As discussed in WebAssembly/WASI#762, change-file-permissions-at is currently meant to change all the file permissions. That's enough for the use cases that motivated it. However, https://github.com/bytecodealliance/preview2-prototyping/issues/37 asks if it's possible to support more fine-grained permissions, in particular changing a file to be only user-readable.

This is a little subtle because WASI has no concept of a "user", and two instances running within the same host "user" are still expected to be sandboxed from each other, and "user" permissions will be accessible to both. Also, some filesystems won't support user permissions, but some filesystems won't support any kind of permissions at all. We should document that the actual protection offered by this function entirely depends on the underlying filesystem. Nevertheless, there are use cases where this functionality may be useful.

The main thing this needs is a proposal for an API that would provide the needed functionality and a sketch of what it would do on Windows.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reading WebAssembly/WASI#762, WebAssembly/WASI#766, and preview2-prototyping#37 to understand the existing permission model and motivating use cases. Develop a proposal for an API supporting user-only permissions, include a sketch of its Windows behavior, and document that protection depends on the underlying filesystem.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
wasm
Domain
operating-systems
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.