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Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2011 12:39:06 +0000
From: Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson <helgith@...il.com>
To: Dan Rosenberg <dan.j.rosenberg@...il.com>
Cc: Pierre Joye <pierre.php@...il.com>,
 oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: CVE Request: PEAR Installer 1.9.1 <= - Symlink Attack


On 1 Mar 2011, at 12:19, Dan Rosenberg wrote:

>> Not sure it is fixable, or maybe using a lock on the symbolic link
>> while fetching its target (to be tested to be sure that such locks
>> cannot be overridden from shell).
>> 
> 
> The easiest way is to just open the target with the O_NOFOLLOW flag to
> avoid following symlinks and abort on failure.  If you need to support
> systems that don't have this flag, then perhaps you could consider
> using an application-specific temporary directory instead of operating
> in the world-writable /tmp.

The PEAR installer does use /tmp (and whatever the Windows equivalent is) by default unless the user opts into a local installation or does indeed change the configuration to use other temp/download/cache directories so users can guard themselves with a good setup.

A flag like that would be handy but doesn't exist (yet) in PHP. 

I moved over to using the O_CREAT|O_EXCL equivalent in PHP when creating new files and lstat + fopen + fstat and comparing mode/ino/dev before writing to an existing file for the cache. I could add an nlink check to that as well.
The current version I've been playing around with is located at https://gist.github.com/848371 - It is missing the nlink part but it should be able to deal with TOCTOU problems. That code snippet hasn't been committed as I consider it work-in-progress still.

Any comments / suggestions are welcome, I did write that one quite late last night :-)

- Helgi

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