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Perl Shel

Discussion in 'Security' started by petaglx, Jul 6, 2012.

  1. petaglx

    petaglx Member

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    Hello there,

    I have a security question.

    All we disable some dangerous function in PHP ti avoid running of PHP shells. As cPanel uses perl for all its tasks and al of PHP's dangeros functions have equivalents in perl, so someone can easily port a pho shell to perl and simply run it on the server. Disabling any function in perl will result in cPanel's many parts to stop working.

    How do you manage this security issue? Is it possible to restrict use of these functions in perl to specific users or user groups?

    All the best.
     
    #1 petaglx, Jul 6, 2012
  2. nospa

    nospa Well-Known Member

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    disable cgi for users, only enable it per request for limited group of users.
     
    #2 nospa, Jul 6, 2012
  3. petaglx

    petaglx Member

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    Hi.

    Isn't it possible to just enable specific functions for specific system users and user groups and keep them disabled for all other users and groups?
     
    #3 petaglx, Jul 6, 2012
  4. nospa

    nospa Well-Known Member

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    afaik - no. you need to disable cgi. We have done this , because only less than 1% of our users (we manage over 10000 users) need cgi. Other users even did not know what is cgi.
     
    #4 nospa, Jul 6, 2012
  5. d'argo

    d'argo Active Member

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    Same here. Very few customers use cgi or perl these days, most of the popular applications are php based. So we just disable cgi and restrict the perl binary. So far no one has asked us to enable either.
     
    #5 d'argo, Jul 6, 2012
  6. qwerty

    qwerty Well-Known Member

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    how did you disable CGI ? I tried the whm -> modify an account and then uncheck the 'CGI Privilege' option and I am stll able to access a simple test.cgi or test.pl on this account (contents of which just prints hello)
     
    #6 qwerty, Jul 8, 2012
  7. nospa

    nospa Well-Known Member

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    remove option to create cgi-bin alias in basic settings, then rebuild apache config.
     
    #7 nospa, Jul 8, 2012
  8. qwerty

    qwerty Well-Known Member

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    Thanks I just did those 2 things but now when I visit a .pl it prompts me to download the perl file and allows me to see the full source code which could be a problem if any customer uploads a perl (.pl) script that contains any sensitive details
     
    #8 qwerty, Jul 8, 2012
  9. nospa

    nospa Well-Known Member

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    Ok, so you need to enable cgi for certain accounts. If your user need perl, just enable it and add custom virtualhost include for only this one user.
     
    #9 nospa, Jul 9, 2012
  10. cPanelTristan

    cPanelTristan Quality Assurance Analyst Staff Member

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    You cannot modify a file trying to download if it has no mime type set or method for the script to execute (when the Apache option to parse the file is removed). If a customer is silly enough to add any script that has sensitive information without checking if the file works and removing it if it doesn't, then that customer probably shouldn't be putting such information online to begin with.
     
    Stop hovering to collapse... Click to collapse... Hover to expand... Click to expand...
    #10 cPanelTristan, Jul 10, 2012
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