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  1. JDK
  2. JDK-4176863

(thread) Thread.currentThread().interrupt() should always be allowed

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Details

    • Bug
    • Resolution: Duplicate
    • P4
    • None
    • 1.2.0
    • core-libs
    • sparc
    • solaris_2.5

    Description

      Regardless of what thread or security context it is executing in, code should
      always be able to set the "interrupted" flag of the current thread, so that it
      can follow the proper, recommended procedure for propagating interrupts
      received via an InterruptedException or an InterruptedIOException that it is
      not going to handle (and those exceptions are not declared to be thrown by the
      current method), but the current implementation of the Thread.interrupt()
      method always calls Thread.checkAccess(), which invokes the checkAccess() on
      the current security manager with this Thread instance, which could throw a
      security exception, depending on the protection domains in the current access
      control context and the security manager's implementation (the default
      java.lang.SecurityManager will deny such access to threads in the system
      thread group without "modifyThread" permission).

      For example, the "Java Thread Deprecation White Paper" contains the following
      passage relating to how to handle thread interrupts:
       
              For this technique to work, it's critical that any method that
              catches an interrupt exception and is not prepared to deal with
              it immediately reasserts the exception. We say reasserts rather
              than rethrows, because it is not always possible to rethrow the
              exception. If the method that catches the InterruptedException
              is not declared to throw this (checked) exception, then it
              should "reinterrupt itself" with the following incantation:
       
                      Thread.currentThread().interrupt();
       
              This ensures that the Thread will reraise the
              InterruptedException as soon as it is able.

      A well-behaved piece of library code might want to follow this pattern
      if it happens to do some I/O and it gets an InterruptedIOException,
      because it has no desire to influence how an interrupt to the current
      should be handled, but it wants to propagate the fact of the interrupt
      to its caller. But it could be executing in any arbitrary thread, say
      perhaps a system callback thread, with an unknown security manager and
      protection domains on the stack, so the above code could cause a
      (unchecked) security exception to be thrown if the security manager
      denies "access" to the current thread, rendering this valuable approach
      dangerous to use. In some cases, a doPrivileged() block would help,
      but not if the library code itself isn't trusted by the security
      manager implementation to interrupt the thread.

      To solve this problem, Thread.interrupt() should not call checkAccess() if it
      is being invoked on the current thread. This would allow the safe usage of the
      recommended idiom for propagating thread interrupts, and it would not open up a
      security hole: setting the interrupted flag on the current thread is no less
      harmful than many other denials of service that untrusted code can already
      undertake on the thread that it is executing in, such as throwing unchecked
      exceptions or going into infinite loops. Note that no security check
      guards the ability to *clear* the interrupted flag of the current
      thread (with Thread.isInterrupted()); I presume that this is because
      the API limits the operation to the current thread anyway, so it's not
      considered particularly dangerous.

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              martin Martin Buchholz
              peterjones Peter Jones
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