*** This bug has been split off bug 146655 ***

------- Original comment by Josh Bressers (Security Response Team) on 2005.01.31
10:43 -------

Graham Dumpleton discovered a flaw which can affect anyone using the
publisher handle of the Apache Software Foundation mod_python.  The
publisher handle lets you publish objects inside modules to make them
callable via URL.  The flaw allows a carefully crafted URL to obtain extra
information that should not be visible (information leak).


Gregory (Grisha) Trubetskoy gives this example:

        For example, given a published module foo.py:

        _secret_info = "BLAH"

        def hello(req):

             return "Hello world!"

        A request to http://yourhost/fo.py/hello would result in (as expected)
        "Hello world!". _scret_info is inaccessible by the rules of the 
        publisher because it begins with an underscore.

        Here is the problem. A request to

        http://yourhost/foo.py/hello/func_globals

        Would result in a slew of interesting info (too much to paste in here),
        among them the name and value of _secret_info and other things such as 
        the full pathname of the file foo.py.

        The fix (tennatively) is this patch to the publisher.py file. As a
        super-quick hack perhaps dissalowing access to anything that contains
        "func_" in the apache config may be the way to go.



The patch for this issue is attachment 110440 [details].