How do I create a temporary file in a secure manner?
The recommended solution is to use the mktemp command. It is widely available (GNU coreutils since 2007), and there has been discussion about including it in POSIX. Old versions may require a -c option to create the file in advance, or they may create the file by default and fail if -c is supplied.
Still, for a definitive solution, there does not appear to be any single command that simply "works" everywhere. The much older command tempfile is not portable, and its use is discouraged according to the manual page: "(...) deprecated; you should use mktemp."
Some legacy systems, like Solaris, may not have either command.
In POSIX systems, you could possibly revert to m4, which has the ability to create a temporary file. However, the command may not be installed by default, and in very old, legacy systems, the m4 implementation may be missing this feature.
The traditional approach:
The problem with this is: if the file already exists (for example, as a symlink to /etc/passwd), then the script may write things in places they should not be written. Even if you remove the file immediately before using it, you still have a RaceCondition: someone could re-create a malicious symlink in the interval between your shell commands.
Use your $HOME
The best portable answer is to put your temporary files in your home directory (or some other private directory, e.g. $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR) where nobody else has write access. Then at least you don't have to worry about malicious users. Simplistic PID-based schemes (or hostname + PID for shared file systems) should be enough to prevent conflicts with your own scripts.
If you're implementing a daemon which runs under a user account with no home directory, why not simply make a private directory for your daemon at the same time you're installing the code?
Unfortunately, people don't seem to like that answer. They demand that their temporary files should be in /tmp or /var/tmp. For those people, there is no clean answer, so they must choose a hack they can live with.
Make a temporary directory
If you can't use $HOME, the next best answer is to create a private directory to hold your temp file(s), instead of creating the files directly inside a world-writable sandbox like /tmp or /var/tmp. The mkdir command is atomic, and only reports success if it actually created the directory. So long as we do not use the -p option, we can be assured that it actually created a brand new directory, rather than following a symlink to danger.
Here is one example of this approach:
1 # Bash
2
3 i=0
4 tempdir=""
5 trap '[ "$tempdir" ] && rm -rf "$tempdir"' EXIT
6
7 while ((++i <= 10)); do
8 tempdir=${TMPDIR:-/tmp}//$RANDOM-$$
9 mkdir -m 700 "$tempdir" 2>/dev/null && break
10 done
11
12 if ((i > 10)); then
13 echo 'Could not create temporary directory' >&2
14 exit 1
15 fi
Instead of RANDOM, awk can be used to generate a random number in a POSIX compatible way:
1 # POSIX
2
3 i=0
4 tempdir=""
5 Cleanup() {
6 [ "$tempdir" ] && rm -rf "$tempdir"
7 if [ "$1" != EXIT ]; then
8 trap - "$1" # reset trap, and
9 kill "-$1" "$$" # resend signal to self
10 fi
11 }
12 for sig in EXIT HUP INT TERM; do
13 trap "Cleanup $sig" "$sig"
14 done
15
16 while [ "$i" -lt 10 ]; do
17 tempdir=${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/$(awk 'BEGIN { srand (); print rand() }')-$$
18 mkdir -m 700 "$tempdir" 2>/dev/null && break
19 sleep 1
20 i=$((i+1))
21 done
22
23 if [ "$i" -ge 10 ]; then
24 echo 'Could not create temporary directory' >&2
25 exit 1
26 fi
Note however that srand() seeds the random number generator using seconds since the epoch which is fairly easy for an adversary to predict and perform a denial of service attack. (Historical awk implementations that predate POSIX may not even use the time of day for srand(), so don't count on this if you're on an ancient system.)
Some systems have a 14-character filename limit, so avoid the temptation to string $RANDOM together more than twice. You're relying on the atomicity of mkdir for your security, not the obscurity of your random name. If someone fills up /tmp with hundreds of thousands of random-number files to thwart you, you've got bigger issues.
In some systems (like Linux):
You have available the mktemp command and you can use its -d option so that it creates temporary directores only accessible for you, with random characters inside their names to make it almost impossible for an attacker to guess the directory name beforehand.
You can create filenames longer than 14 characters in /tmp.
And then you can create your particular files inside the temporary directory.
Use platform-specific tools
If you're writing a script for only a specific set of systems, and if those systems have a mktemp or tempfile tool which works correctly, you can use that. Make sure that your tool actually creates the temporary file, and does not simply give you an unused name. The options will vary from system to system, so you will have to write your script with that in mind. Since some platforms have none of these tools, this is not a portable solution, but it's often good enough, especially if your script is only targeting a specific operating system.
Here's an example using Linux's mktemp:
Using m4
The m4 approach is theoretically POSIX-standard, but not in practice -- it may not work on MacOS, as its version of m4 is too old (as of July, 2021). Nevertheless, here's an example. Note that mkstemp requires a template, including a path prefix, or else it creates the temporary file in the current directory.
Or, alternatively:
Other approaches
Another not-quite-serious suggestion is to include C code in the script that implements a mktemp(1) command based on the mktemp(3) library function, compile it, and use that in the script. But this has a couple problems:
- The useless Solaris systems where we would need this probably don't have a C compiler either.
- Chicken and egg problem: we need a temporary file name to hold the compiler's output.