Secure Programming Cookbook for C and C++

2.7. Restricting Access Permissions for New Files on Unix

Problem

You want to restrict the initial access permissions assigned to a file created by your program.

Solution

On Unix, the operating system stores a value known as the umask for each process it uses when creating new files on behalf of the process. The umask is used to disable permission bits that may be specified by the system call used to create files.

Discussion

Warning

Remember that umasks apply only on file or directory creation. Calls to chmod( ) and fchmod( ) are not modified by umask settings.

When a process creates a new file, it specifies the access permissions to assign the new file as a parameter to the system call that creates the file. The operating system modifies the access permissions by computing the intersection of the inverse of the umask and the permissions requested by the process. The access permission bits that remain after the intersection is computed are what the operating system actually uses for the new file. In other words, in the following example code, if the variable requested_permissions contained the permissions passed to the operating system to create a new file, the variable actual_permissions would be the actual permissions that the operating system would use to create the file.

requested_permissions = 0666;
actual_permissions = requested_permissions & ~umask(  );

A process inherits the value of its umask from its parent process when the process is created. Normally, the shell sets a default ...