I understand how suPHP allows each site on a shared host to be isolated since the scripts are being run as the website owner. So a security flaw in one site cannot affect another site. I am wondering if there is a way to allow suPHP to protect a script from itself. Let me give you two examples:
Scenario 1 --------------- Script upload.php is designed to allow a end user to upload files to a directory so that file can then be served by the web server. The intent might be to allow image uploads. But upload.php is careless and doesn't check to ensure that the uploaded file is actually an image. A hacker uploads a file called destroy.php. This is placed in the upload directory which is publicly accessible. So the hacker makes a request to destroy.php which is designed to remove any files it has permission to remove. Since it is owned by the website owner it will be run as the website owner. This means it can delete the entire website. Is there any way to prevent the above from happening? Is there something in suPHP that helps with this? The only thing I can think of it to disable the suPHP handler on the upload directory. Scenario 2 --------------- In this situation there is no upload. We have a php script called careless.php. It makes the mistake of evaling data that came from the web request (i.e. eval($_GET['code'])). A hacker realizes this and makes a request that sets $_GET['code'] to something evil (maybe deletes all files in the website). Is there anything in suPHP to prevent this? Obviously my scenarios are highly contrived. But I think they are simplifications of real world problems. An exploit in some 3rd party software (Wordpress, etc) may allow a hacker to carry out attacks like this on the website running the software. When running php as an apache module these exploits allowed hacks to take advantage of too permissive upload directories and even invade other sites on the same server (which also had to permissive upload directories). But the website itself was not at much risk since it was owned by a different user than the user php was executing as (assuming the website files were not group/world writable). Under suPHP each site is isolated (good!) but it seems that an exploit allows the hacker more potential for problems within that isolated site than before. Am I understanding things correctly? Is there something I am missing? Any insights would be greatly appreciated. Eric -- http://saveyourcall.com - Easily record phone calls from any phone http://pixelwareinc.com - Atlanta-based web development and design
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