Security is a very important point in librarys. In most use cases there is nearly no point of danger in using elektra. But some a very security related, especially when you use a daemon or some kind of distributed configuration.

Files and Environment Variables

system/ paths are never effected by environment variables. They always use the build-in KDB_DB_SYSTEM path.

user/ paths, on the other hand, are resolved by:

1. metadata "owner", only to be modified by the program
2. the environment variable USER So in crontab scripts you should have export USER=<your name="" here>=""> so that kdb works (if getlogin does not get the information from somewhere else - which is typically the case on linux systems)
3. Falls back to user "test". So if elektra tries to access e.g. /home/test/.kdb that typically means that USER is not set correctly, use export USER=<name here>=""> in that script.

This owner is appended to KDB_DB_HOME.

All files below those paths might be modified by elektra programs. By making KDB_DB_SYSTEM world-writeable, the users might overwrite the configuration of others.

Compiler Options

Can be changed using standard CMake ways. Some hints:

http://wiki.debian.org/Hardening

Memory Leaks

We use valgrind (–tool=memcheck) to make sure that elektra does not suffer memory leaks and incorrect memory handling.