fix(windows): grant icacls ACEs by *SID, not unqualified username

An unqualified username handed to icacls is ambiguous: on a machine whose
hostname equals the username (a common Windows setup), it resolves to the
MACHINE account instead of the user. Combined with /inheritance:r, that
leaves ~/.gstack with a single ACE matching nobody — the process that just
"secured" the directory locks itself out, and icacls still reports success.

Both icacls sites in the repo (restrictFilePermissions and
restrictDirectoryPermissions in browse/src/file-permissions.ts — the only
icacls call sites; setup has none) now grant via icacls' literal-SID form
`*<SID>`, resolved once per process from System32\whoami.exe (pinned to
System32 because a bare `whoami` under a bash-flavoured PATH picks up the
MSYS build, which rejects /user). Fallback when the SID can't be resolved
is the domain-qualified `USERDOMAIN\username` name, which is unambiguous
where the bare username was not.

Windows-only regression tests assert the hardened directory stays usable
by the calling process (readdir + write), which is exactly the check that
a not-toThrow assertion sailed past before.

Contributed by @asizux2 (PR #2479); the same defect was independently fixed by @Icandi40, @chiragborse1, @IntegriGit and @voltapix26.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Garry Tan
2026-08-14 20:20:53 -07:00
co-authored by Claude Fable 5
parent 81659f9456
commit f96fd46b1c
2 changed files with 78 additions and 2 deletions
+30
View File
@@ -77,6 +77,26 @@ describe('restrictDirectoryPermissions', () => {
fs.mkdirSync(d);
expect(() => restrictDirectoryPermissions(d)).not.toThrow();
});
test('on Windows, the directory stays usable by the calling process', () => {
if (process.platform !== 'win32') return;
const d = path.join(tmpDir, 'still-usable');
fs.mkdirSync(d);
fs.writeFileSync(path.join(d, 'before'), 'x');
restrictDirectoryPermissions(d);
// Regression: an unqualified username passed to icacls can resolve to
// the machine SID rather than the user account. Combined with
// /inheritance:r that leaves a directory whose only ACE matches nobody,
// so the process that just "secured" it can no longer enumerate or
// write to it. icacls still reports success, so a not-toThrow assertion
// sails straight past it — hence these access checks.
expect(() => fs.readdirSync(d)).not.toThrow();
expect(fs.readdirSync(d)).toContain('before');
expect(() => fs.writeFileSync(path.join(d, 'after'), 'y')).not.toThrow();
expect(fs.readFileSync(path.join(d, 'after'), 'utf8')).toBe('y');
});
});
describe('writeSecureFile', () => {
@@ -138,6 +158,16 @@ describe('mkdirSecure', () => {
expect(() => mkdirSecure(d)).not.toThrow();
});
test('on Windows, the created directory stays usable by the caller', () => {
if (process.platform !== 'win32') return;
// The state-dir path that broke: mkdirSecure() creates .gstack/, hardens
// it, and the very next thing the daemon does is write a lockfile inside.
const d = path.join(tmpDir, 'state', '.gstack');
mkdirSecure(d);
expect(() => fs.writeFileSync(path.join(d, 'browse.json.lock'), '1')).not.toThrow();
expect(fs.readdirSync(d)).toContain('browse.json.lock');
});
test('recursive behavior: creates intermediate directories', () => {
const d = path.join(tmpDir, 'a', 'b', 'c');
mkdirSecure(d);