-Let's do an ikiwiki security analysis..
+Let's do an ikiwiki security analysis.
If you are using ikiwiki to render pages that only you can edit, do not
generate any wrappers, and do not use the cgi, then there are no more
others edit pages in your wiki, then some possible security issues do need
to be kept in mind.
-# Probable holes
+[[toc levels=2]]
-## html attacks
+----
-ikiwiki does not attempt to do any santization of the html on the wiki.
-[[MarkDown]] allows embedding of arbitrary html into a markdown document. If
-you let anyone else edit files on the wiki, then anyone can have fun exploiting
-the web browser bug of the day. This type of attack is typically referred
-to as an XSS attack ([google](http://www.google.com/search?q=xss+attack)).
+# Probable holes
-## image files etc attacks
+_(The list of things to fix.)_
-If it enounters a file type it does not understand, ikiwiki just copies it
-into place. So if you let users add any kind of file they like, they can
-upload images, movies, windows executables, css files, etc. If these files exploit security holes in the browser of someone who's viewing the wiki, that can be a security problem.
+## commit spoofing
-Of course nobody else seems to worry about this in other wikis, so should we?
+Anyone with direct commit access can forge "web commit from foo" and
+make it appear on [[RecentChanges]] like foo committed. One way to avoid
+this would be to limit web commits to those done by a certian user.
-## web server attacks
+## other stuff to look at
-If your web server does any parsing of special sorts of files (for example,
-server parsed html files), then if you let anyone else add files to the wiki,
-they can try to use this to exploit your web server.
+I need to audit the git backend a bit, and have been meaning to
+see if any CRLF injection type things can be done in the CGI code.
-## symlink attacks
+----
-Could a committer trick ikiwiki into following a symlink and operating on
-some other tree that it shouldn't? svn supports symlinks, so one can get
-into the repo. ikiwiki uses File::Find to traverse the repo, and does not
-tell it to follow symlinks, but it might be possible to race replacing a
-directory with a symlink and trick it into following.
+# Potential gotchas
-It would certianly be possible to start out with a directory, let ikiwiki
-run and find a file in there, then replace it with a symlink, and ikiwiki
-would then go ahead and follow the symlink when it went to open that file
-to read it. If it was some private file and was running suid, that could be
-bad.
+_(Things not to do.)_
-TODO: seems that locking to prevent more than one ikiwiki run at a time
-would both fix this and is a good idea in general. With locking, an
-attacker couldn't get ikiwiki to svn up while another instance was running.
+## image file etc attacks
-## multiple accessors of wiki source directory
+If it enounters a file type it does not understand, ikiwiki just copies it
+into place. So if you let users add any kind of file they like, they can
+upload images, movies, windows executables, css files, etc (though not html
+files). If these files exploit security holes in the browser of someone
+who's viewing the wiki, that can be a security problem.
-If multiple people can write to the source directory ikiwiki is using, then
-one can cause trouble for the other when they run ikiwiki through symlink
-attacks.
+Of course nobody else seems to worry about this in other wikis, so should we?
-So it's best if only one person can ever write to the checkout that ikiwiki
-compiles the wiki from.
+Currently only people with direct svn commit access can upload such files
+(and if you wanted to you could block that with a svn pre-commit hook).
+Users with only web commit access are limited to editing pages as ikiwiki
+doesn't support file uploads from browsers (yet), so they can't exploit
+this.
-## webserver symlink attacks
+## multiple accessors of wiki directory
-If someone checks in a symlink to /etc/passwd, ikiwiki would publish that.
-To aoid this, ikiwiki will need to avoid reading files that are symlinks.
-TODO and note discussion of races above.
+If multiple people can write to the source directory ikiwiki is using, or
+to the destination directory it writes files to, then one can cause trouble
+for the other when they run ikiwiki through symlink attacks.
+
+So it's best if only one person can ever write to those directories.
## setup files
Just don't do it. [[ikiwiki.setup]] is *not* used as the setup file for
this wiki, BTW.
-## svn commit logs
+## page locking can be bypassed via direct svn commits
-Anyone with svn commit access can forge "web commit from foo" and make it appeat on [[RecentChanges]] like foo committed. One way to avoid this would be to limit web commits to those done by a certian user.
+A locked page can only be edited on the web by an admin, but
+anyone who is allowed to commit direct to svn can bypass this. This is by
+design, although a subversion pre-commit hook could be used to prevent
+editing of locked pages when using subversion, if you really need to.
-It's actually possible to force a whole series of svn commits to appear to have come just before yours, by forging svn log output. This could be guarded against somewhat by revision number scanning, since the forged revisions would duplicate the numbers of unforged ones. Or subversion could fix svn log to indent commit messages, which would make such forgery impossible..
+## web server attacks
-ikiwiki escapes any html in svn commit logs to prevent other mischief.
+If your web server does any parsing of special sorts of files (for example,
+server parsed html files), then if you let anyone else add files to the wiki,
+they can try to use this to exploit your web server.
----
# Hopefully non-holes
-(AKA, the assumptions that will be the root of most security holes...)
+_(AKA, the assumptions that will be the root of most security holes...)_
## exploting ikiwiki with bad content
Someone could add bad content to the wiki and hope to exploit ikiwiki.
Note that ikiwiki runs with perl taint checks on, so this is unlikely.
+One fun thing in ikiwiki is its handling of a PageSpec, which involves
+translating it into perl and running the perl. Of course, this is done
+*very* carefully to guard against injecting arbitrary perl code.
+
## publishing cgi scripts
ikiwiki does not allow cgi scripts to be published as part of the wiki. Or
ikiwiki does not expose untrusted data to the shell. In fact it doesn't use
system() at all, and the only use of backticks is on data supplied by the
-wiki admin. And it runs with taint checks on of course..
+wiki admin and untainted filenames. And it runs with taint checks on of
+course..
+
+## cgi data security
+
+When ikiwiki runs as a cgi to edit a page, it is passed the name of the
+page to edit. It has to make sure to sanitise this page, to prevent eg,
+editing of ../../../foo, or editing of files that are not part of the wiki,
+such as subversion dotfiles. This is done by sanitising the filename
+removing unallowed characters, then making sure it doesn't start with "/"
+or contain ".." or "/.svn/". Annoyingly ad-hoc, this kind of code is where
+security holes breed. It needs a test suite at the very least.
+
+## CGI::Session security
+
+I've audited this module and it is massively insecure by default. ikiwiki
+uses it in one of the few secure ways; by forcing it to write to a
+directory it controls (and not /tmp) and by setting a umask that makes the
+file not be world readable.
+
+## cgi password security
+
+Login to the wiki involves sending a password in cleartext over the net.
+Cracking the password only allows editing the wiki as that user though.
+If you care, you can use https, I suppose. If you do use https either for
+all of the wiki, or just the cgi access, then consider using the sslcookie
+option.
+
+## XSS holes in CGI output
+
+ikiwiki has not yet been audited to ensure that all cgi script input/output
+is sanitised to prevent XSS attacks. For example, a user can't register
+with a username containing html code (anymore).
+
+It's difficult to know for sure if all such avenues have really been
+closed though.
+
+## HTML::Template security
+
+If the [[plugins/template]] plugin is enabled, users can modify templates
+like any other part of the wiki. This assumes that HTML::Template is secure
+when used with untrusted/malicious templates. (Note that includes are not
+allowed, so that's not a problem.)
+
+----
+
+# Fixed holes
+
+_(Unless otherwise noted, these were discovered and immediately fixed by the
+ikiwiki developers.)_
## destination directory file replacement
Still, this sort of attack is something to keep in mind.
-## cgi data security
+## symlink attacks
-When ikiwiki runs as a cgi to edit a page, it is passed the name of the
-page to edit. It has to make sure to sanitise this page, to prevent eg,
-editing of ../../../foo, or editing of files that are not part of the wiki,
-such as subversion dotfiles. This is done by sanitising the filename
-removing unallowed characters, then making sure it doesn't start with "/"
-or contain ".." or "/.svn/". Annoyingly ad-hoc, this kind of code is where
-security holes breed. It needs a test suite at the very least.
+Could a committer trick ikiwiki into following a symlink and operating on
+some other tree that it shouldn't? svn supports symlinks, so one can get
+into the repo. ikiwiki uses File::Find to traverse the repo, and does not
+tell it to follow symlinks, but it might be possible to race replacing a
+directory with a symlink and trick it into following the link.
+
+Also, if someone checks in a symlink to /etc/passwd, ikiwiki would read and
+publish that, which could be used to expose files a committer otherwise
+wouldn't see.
+
+To avoid this, ikiwiki will skip over symlinks when scanning for pages, and
+uses locking to prevent more than one instance running at a time. The lock
+prevents one ikiwiki from running a svn up at the wrong time to race
+another ikiwiki. So only attackers who can write to the working copy on
+their own can race it.
+
+## symlink + cgi attacks
+
+Similarly, a svn commit of a symlink could be made, ikiwiki ignores it
+because of the above, but the symlink is still there, and then you edit the
+page from the web, which follows the symlink when reading the page
+(exposing the content), and again when saving the changed page (changing
+the content).
+
+This was fixed for page saving by making ikiwiki refuse to write to files
+that are symlinks, or that are in subdirectories that are symlinks,
+combined with the above locking.
+
+For page editing, it's fixed by ikiwiki checking to make sure that it
+already has found a page by scanning the tree, before loading it for
+editing, which as described above, also is done in a way that avoids
+symlink attacks.
+
+## underlaydir override attacks
+
+ikiwiki also scans an underlaydir for pages, this is used to provide stock
+pages to all wikis w/o needing to copy them into the wiki. Since ikiwiki
+internally stores only the base filename from the underlaydir or srcdir,
+and searches for a file in either directory when reading a page source,
+there is the potential for ikiwiki's scanner to reject a file from the
+srcdir for some reason (such as it being contained in a directory that is
+symlinked in), find a valid copy of the file in the underlaydir, and then
+when loading the file, mistakenly load the bad file from the srcdir.
+
+This attack is avoided by making ikiwiki refuse to add any files from the
+underlaydir if a file also exists in the srcdir with the same name.
+
+## multiple page source issues
+
+Note that I previously worried that underlay override attacks could also be
+accomplished if ikiwiki were extended to support other page markup
+languages besides markdown. However, a closer look indicates that this is
+not a problem: ikiwiki does preserve the file extension when storing the
+source filename of a page, so a file with another extension that renders to
+the same page name can't bypass the check. Ie, ikiwiki won't skip foo.rst
+in the srcdir, find foo.mdwn in the underlay, decide to render page foo and
+then read the bad foo.mdwn. Instead it will remember the .rst extension and
+only render a file with that extension.
+
+## XSS attacks in page content
+
+ikiwiki supports protecting users from their own broken browsers via the
+[[plugins/htmlscrubber]] plugin, which is enabled by default.
-## cgi password security
+## svn commit logs
-Login to the wiki involves sending a password in cleartext over the net.
-Cracking the password only allows editing the wiki as that user though.
-If you care, you can use https, I suppose.
+It's was possible to force a whole series of svn commits to appear to
+have come just before yours, by forging svn log output. This was
+guarded against by using svn log --xml.
-## CGI::Session security
+ikiwiki escapes any html in svn commit logs to prevent other mischief.
-I've audited this module and it is massively insecure by default. ikiwiki
-uses it in one of the few secure ways; by forcing it to write to a
-directory it controls (and not /tmp) and by setting a umask that makes the
-file not be world readable.
+## XML::Parser
+
+XML::Parser is used by the aggregation plugin, and has some security holes.
+Bug #[378411](http://bugs.debian.org/378411) does not
+seem to affect our use, since the data is not encoded as utf-8 at that
+point. #[378412](http://bugs.debian.org/378412) could affect us, although it
+doesn't seem very exploitable. It has a simple fix, and has been fixed in
+Debian unstable.
+
+## include loops
+
+Various directives that cause one page to be included into another could
+be exploited to DOS the wiki, by causing a loop. Ikiwiki has always guarded
+against this one way or another; the current solution should detect all
+types of loops involving preprocessor directives.