Re: [GENERAL] Postgres CGI Security Problem

On Sat, 8 Aug 1998, Vadim Mikheev wrote:

> Chris Hardie wrote:
> > 
> > The situation: I have one machine with general user access.  Some users
> > (including myself) own a postgres database.  Some users (including myself)
> > use postgres as a back-end for CGI applications, using the Postgres.pm
> > module for Perl. This requires that user "nobody" (or www, or whomever)
> > have read/write access to my database.
> > 
> > The problem: While it's very handy that I can write CGI scripts that can
> > read/write my database, it's a security problem.  Other users` CGI scripts
> > will also make use of the "nobody" identity to access the database, which
> > means they can potentially read/write the data in my database if they
> > wanted to.
> > 
> > The fix: You tell me.  It would seem to involve a "setuid" of sorts for
>                                                      ^^^^^^
> > how the httpd process accesses the postgres database.
> 
> Apache has suexec program ro run user' CGI and SSI under
> user' privileges...

And you could ofcourse always use password authenication for those 
databases....

Maarten

ps. only problem is that those passwords have to be in your perl-script, 
and that script has to be world-readable, unless you have a system that 
supports ACL's, then you can set it only readable to user nobody or www 
or whatever

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| TU Delft, The Netherlands, Faculty of Information Technology and Systems  |
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