Hi everyone,
I’ve fixed two bugs related to the security cache recently (XWIKI-21013 and XWIKI-18508). Both are important fixes but both also touch very security-sensitive code. In particular the first fix includes a complete rewrite of the code that is responsible for building the hierarchy of groups of a user. We have quite some tests for this code but despite these tests that even covered the scenario explained in XWIKI-21013 the tests didn’t find XWIKI-21013 so I’m not confident they would discover other, subtle bugs. Currently, these fixes target just 15.6RC1 so they’re yet to be released.
I’m also planning a redesign of the internal data structures of the security cache to make it more robust with respect to small cache sizes (compared to the number of documents) where the hierarchical nature of the cache can cause serious problems right now as the cache might, e.g., dispose the root of hierarchy when it is full, thus unintentionally flushing the whole cache.
I’m proposing to backport both fixes to 15.5.x and 14.10.x. There are two options:
- Backport them right now so they’re included in the next releases.
- Backport them some time after the release of 15.6, e.g., at the beginning of September so the changes got some testing in 15.6.
We could also choose different options for 15.5.x and 14.10.x. Any opinions?
I’m +1 for option 2.