Webmin-alike cgi script and security

[Denis S. Otkidach]

On Mon, 22 Jul 2002, Dave Swegen wrote:

DS> The scripts themselves are run as the default webserver
DS> user, and take
DS> care of stuff like authentication and basic sanity checking.
DS>
DS> If all input checks out an external script is called using
DS> sudo to gain
DS> root privs. Any data that should be provided is pickled and

Adding webserver default user to sudoers is a bad thing anyway.
It's better to use suexec with unique user, that will be used for
this script only.

DS> stored in a
DS> file with a unique name, which is then the only argument to
DS> the sudo'ed
DS> script. Depending on the return value any return data is
DS> picked up again
DS> by the cgi script from a pickled data structure with the
DS> same name.

-- 
Denis S. Otkidach
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http://diveinto.python.ru/ [ru]