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An absolute path may sometimes contain aliases, shadows, symbolic links and shortcuts as opposed to canonical paths, which refer to actual files/directories that these point to. Canonicalizing file names makes it much easier safer to verify a path, directory, or file name by making it easier to compare names.

Noncompliant Code Example

In this noncompliant code example, the user inputs a part of the path as a command line argument. Let {{argv\[1\]}} be "{{java"}} where {{/tmp/java}} is a symbolic link that points to another file in some directory. On UNIX, the {{getAbsolutePath()}} method includes {{/tmp/java}} (name of the symbolic link) in the path that it returns. On the other hand, on Windows and Macintosh systems, this behavior is not observed. The symbolic link is fully resolved inon thisthese caseplatforms leadingresulting toin implementation defined behavior.

public static void main(String[] args) {

  File f = new File("/tmp/" + args[1]);
  String absPath = f.getAbsolutePath();

}

Compliant Solution

Use the getCanonicalPath() method, introduced in Java 2, wherever possible since because it resolves the aliases, shortcuts or symbolic links across all platforms. The value of the alias is not included in the returned value. Moreover, relative references like the double period (..) are also removed. The getCanonicalPath() method throws a security exception when used within applets since as it reveals too much information about the host machine. The getCanonicalFile() method behaves like getCanonicalPath() but returns a new File object instead of a String.

public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

  File f = new File("/tmp/" + args[1]);
  String canonicalPath = f.getCanonicalPath();

}

Risk Assessment

Using path names from untrusted sources without first canonicalizing the filenames involved may seriously compromise the security of a Java applicationmay result in operations on the wrong files.

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