Deleted File Attributes Reveal an Old Vulnerability
Whenever you explore unusual sources of information, you run into odd things. The study of deleted file attributes is no exception. The "dead or alive" file access time patterns in Figure 4 reveal a privacy problem in an old version of the gcc compiler: The three compiler temporary files are created with world read permission. Thus, for a brief instant of time, any user can have read access to someone else's compiler temporary files, even when that user has no access at all to the program source code or to the resulting executable file. A quick experiment with a newer gcc version shows that the privacy problem has been fixed in the mean time.
-- W.V.
