Shell Simulation Via CGI

mischi writes "CGI-Shell simulates a shell using CGI. So everybody who has a CGI-directory on a web-server, also has its own shell on it -- comparable with Telnet or SSH. That's really practical, because most webhosters don't offer a shell (for free) -- but do offer CGI. With CGI-Shell you can execute commands, copy files or just explore your webserver. Even a history and auto-completion with tabulator are included. "

Comments

Backdoors

[TheGreek]

waiting to happen. Expect to see hosting providers outlaw this quickly, if they haven't done so in their ToSes already.

UID issues

[Ryu2]

Most webserver setups run under a non-priveleged UID of 'nobody' or the like... which means that normally, the web server user would not be able to access files owned by YOUR own UID. Would there be some sort of set-UID involved here?

I've used something exatly like this for months

[stratjakt]

I use it to add ipfwd lines to an internal router box around here. Runs in cgi under apache, lets me type sh commands and see the output.

This is just a new version of an old product, and has the same major problem: "applications interacting with the user (those that ask for input from the user), e.g. passwd are still a problem. "

So it's good for doing a chmod or ipfwd line, but you cant run vi or the like.

How hard would it be to get full terminal emulation through a browser applet?

Stop whinging - this is a good thing

[cliveholloway]

Any exploits that this allows idiots/script kiddies to do are exploits that a Perl programmer with half a brain can write in about 6 lines of code:

use CGI;
my $q=CGI->new();
my $command = $q->param('command')
$command and print $q->header('text/plain').`$command`."\n" and exit;
print $q->header.$q->start_html.$q->start_form.$q->textf ield('command').$q->end_form.$q->end_html;

If your web server is so badly configured that this creates security issues for you, you seriously need to read up on security.

.02

cLive ;-)