Fork (file System) - Possible Security and Data Loss Risks

Possible Security and Data Loss Risks

When a file system supports different forks, the applications should be aware of them, or security risks can arise. Allowing legacy software to access data without appropriate shims in place is the primary culprit for such problems.

If the different system utilities (disk explorer, antivirus software, archivers, and so on), are not aware of the different forks, the following problems can arise:

  • The user will never know the presence of any alternate fork nor the total size of the file, just of the main data fork.
  • Computer viruses can hide in alternate forks on Windows and never get detected if the antivirus software is not aware of forks.
  • Data can be lost when sending files via fork-unaware channels, such as e-mail, file systems without support for forks, or even when copying files between file systems with forks support if the program that made the copy does not support forks or when compressing files with software that does not support forks.

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