annotate PLUGIN_HOWTO @ 30273:6829b27ee4c8

This patch attempts to fix four bugs in the oscar protocol plugin that were introduced with the X-Status code in Pidgin 2.7.0. Problem #1 (the remotely-triggerable crash): The crash happens when a buddy sets an xstatus message containing <desc> but no closing </desc>, or <title> but no closing </title>. The fix is to check the result of strstr(closing_tag_name) and do nothing if it is NULL. This is CVE-2010-2528. Problem #2: Fixes potential incorrect parsing of the xstatus string that could result in an incorrect message being displayed to the libpurple user. Happens if an xstatus message contains </desc> before <desc>, or </title> before <title>. The fix is to start looking for the closing tag at the end of the beginning tag rather than at the beginning of the xstatus xml. Probably not a security problem, but definitely a bug. Problem #3: Fixes potential incorrect parsing of the xstatus string that could result in the title not being shown to the libpurple user. Happens if the close title tag appears after the desc tag in the xstatus xml, because we add a null character at the beginning of the close title tag, so strstr() for the desc tag would stop searching there. Probably not a security problem, but definitely a bug. Problem #4: Fixes potential incorrect display of the xstatus string that could result in an incorrect message being displayed to the libpurple user. Happens because we reusing the 'xml' string when preparing the string for the user, but we copy values from xml to xml. If those values overlap with themselves or with each other then an incorrect value could be displayed. Probably not a security problem, but definitely a bug.

For information on writing a plugin for Purple, Pidgin or Finch, go
http://developer.pidgin.im and click on API.  From there, see the
HOWTOs in the "Related Pages" section.

You can also generate this documentation locally by installing
doxygen and graphviz dot, then running "make docs" in the
source tree.  The documentation will be in the docs/html directory.