Bug 158174

Summary:	design flaw: webalizer uses $PWD/webalizer.conf as default.
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4	Reporter:	Florian Brand <florian.brand>
Component:	webalizer	Assignee:	Joe Orton <jorton>
Status:	CLOSED NEXTRELEASE	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	4.0
Target Milestone:	---
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Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
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Last Closed:	2005-10-04 07:40:18 UTC	Type:	---
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oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Embargoed:

Description Florian Brand 2005-05-19 11:47:33 UTC

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041215 Firefox/1.0 Red Hat/1.0-12.EL4

Description of problem:
webalizer tries to open it's config file from the current working directory.
If it doesn't find a config file there it opens /etc/webalizer.conf

So it is dependent of your location in the filesystem what is executed.
I consider this a security flaw. (imagine an intruder places a webalizer.conf in /tmp and root executes:
host /tmp # /usr/bin/webalizer

In addition to that: I discovered this behaviour when one of my students executed webalizer in /etc/httpd/conf.d/. In this directory there is Apache's webalizer.conf file.

It is not technically a bug, since webalizer works as described in the man-page.
I suggest to change the behaviour of webalizer to open $HOME/.webalizer.conf instead of $PWD/webalizer.conf before defaulting to /etc/webalizer.conf.







Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
webalizer-2.0.1_10.25

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. cd /etc/httpd/conf.d/
2. /usr/bin/webalizer
3.
  

Actual Results:  webalizer hangs because of a syntax error

Expected Results:  webalizer uses /etc/webalizer.conf

Additional info:

do we have a priority Security/Low ?

Comment 1 Joe Orton 2005-09-14 14:19:00 UTC

I think it would be reasonable to at least check that the owner/group of the
file found in the pwd matches the effective uid/group, but not to change the
documented behaviour of loading $PWD/webalizer.conf.

Comment 2 Joe Orton 2005-10-04 07:40:18 UTC

This problem is resolved in the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red
Hat does not currently plan to provide a resolution for this in a Red Hat
Enterprise Linux update for currently deployed systems.