Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 158174
design flaw: webalizer uses $PWD/webalizer.conf as default.
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:07:18 EST
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 ?
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.
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.