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check_msole

Part of protector (http://protector.sourceforge.net)
By Chris Lowth, (protector@lowth.com)

Synopsis 

   check_msole [-l] [-d] [-D] [-s directory] filename

Description

check_msole is the module used by the protector suite to validate the safety of Microsoft OLE compound documents such as those created by the MS-Office suite. The program identifies the type of the file and it's embedded objects (if any) by looking at the internal document file system structure and contents. It then verifies that the document and all it's objects are of safe types, and contain no macros or other executable code.

The results of the program's deliberations are written to the standard output in such a format that the protector's part_filter can collect and use them.

The program is cable of identifying (with varying degrees of accuracy) and verifying the safety of the following types of file..

Output

The program outputs its information using a combination of lines in the following formats..

error= The value "none" means that everything has worked well. Other values give details of the reason for failure.
type= This value gives the mime type of the document, if it was possible to determine it.
safe= The value "yes" means that the document is free of viruses and consists only of known safe components. "no" means that the document contains macros or other potentially unsafe components. "Unknown" means that the document contains components that could not be checked for safety (most probably because the author does not know how).

Options

-l List the directory structure of the internal document file system
-d Turn on debugging, and the display of various internal variables.
-D Dump the internal file system components into the working directory. This option is really only useful for development and diagnostic purposes.
-s directory Save the files from the OLE document internal file system to disk.

Background and credits

In order to write this program, I have made extensive use of the published source code of Sun's StarOffice and the excellent documentation provided with "Elsa" and "Laola" by Martin Schwartz (http://www.wbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/~schwartz/pmh/index.html or http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~schwartz/pmh/index.html). Thank you Sun and Martin for some superb code and sources of information

  All material on this page, and the "protector" software to which it relates is Copyright (C) 2002 by Lowth.com. "Protector" is free, open source software, licensed according to the terms of the GNU Public License