-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.
+[[toc levels=2]]
+
+----
+
# Probable holes
-## html attacks
+_(The list of things to fix.)_
-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)).
+## commit spoofing
-## image files etc attacks
+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 certain user.
+
+## other stuff to look at
+
+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.
+
+----
+
+# Potential gotchas
+
+_(Things not to do.)_
+
+## image file etc attacks
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.
+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.
Of course nobody else seems to worry about this in other wikis, so should we?
+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.
+
+## multiple accessors of wiki directory
+
+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
+
+Setup files are not safe to keep in subversion with the rest of the wiki.
+Just don't do it. [[ikiwiki.setup]] is *not* used as the setup file for
+this wiki, BTW.
+
+## page locking can be bypassed via direct svn commits
+
+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.
+
## web server attacks
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.
-## 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.
+# Hopefully non-holes
-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.
+_(AKA, the assumptions that will be the root of most security holes...)_
-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.
+## exploiting ikiwiki with bad content
-## multiple accessors of wiki source directory
+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.
-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
-sttacks.
+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.
-So it's best if only one person can ever write to the checkout that ikiwiki
-compiles the moo from.
+## publishing cgi scripts
-## webserver symlink attacks
+ikiwiki does not allow cgi scripts to be published as part of the wiki. Or
+rather, the script is published, but it's not marked executable (except in
+the case of "destination directory file replacement" below), so hopefully
+your web server will not run it.
-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.
+## suid wrappers
+
+ikiwiki --wrapper is intended to generate a wrapper program that
+runs ikiwiki to update a given wiki. The wrapper can in turn be made suid,
+for example to be used in a [[post-commit]] hook by people who cannot write
+to the html pages, etc.
+
+If the wrapper script is made suid, then any bugs in this wrapper would be
+security holes. The wrapper is written as securely as I know how, is based
+on code that has a history of security use long before ikiwiki, and there's
+been no problem yet.
+
+## shell exploits
+
+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 untainted filenames. And it runs with taint checks on of
+course..
## cgi data security
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 moo as that user though.
-If you care, you can use https, I suppose.
+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.
-## CGI::Session security
+## 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.
-Is CGI::Session secure? Well, it writes the session files world-readable,
-which could be used by a local attacker to take over someone's session.
+## HTML::Template security
-I have no idea if CGI::Session writes session files securely to /tmp.
-ikiwiki makes it write them to a directory it controls (but see "multiple
-accessors of wiki source directory" above).
+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.)
----
-# Probable non-holes
+# Plugins
-## exploting ikiwiki with bad content
+The security of [[plugins]] depends on how well they're written and what
+external tools they use. The plugins included in ikiwiki are all held to
+the same standards as the rest of ikiwiki, but with that said, here are
+some security notes for them.
-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.
+* The [[plugins/img]] plugin assumes that imagemagick/perlmagick are secure
+ from malformed image attacks. Imagemagick has had security holes in the
+ past. To be able to exploit such a hole, a user would need to be able to
+ upload images to the wiki.
-## publishing cgi scripts
+----
-ikiwiki does not allow cgi scripts to be published as part of the wiki. Or
-rather, the script is published, but it's not marked executable, so
-hopefully your web server will not run it.
+# Fixed holes
-## suid wrappers
+_(Unless otherwise noted, these were discovered and immediately fixed by the
+ikiwiki developers.)_
-ikiwiki --wrapper is intended to generate a wrapper program that
-runs ikiwiki to update a given wiki. The wrapper can in turn be made suid,
-for example to be used in a [[post-commit]] hook by people who cannot write
-to the html pages, etc.
+## destination directory file replacement
-If the wrapper script is made suid, then any bugs in this wrapper would be
-security holes. The wrapper is written as securely as I know how, is based on code that has a history of security use long before ikiwiki, and there's been no problem yet.
+Any file in the destination directory that is a valid page filename can be
+replaced, even if it was not originally rendered from a page. For example,
+ikiwiki.cgi could be edited in the wiki, and it would write out a
+replacement. File permission is preseved. Yipes!
-## shell exploits
+This was fixed by making ikiwiki check if the file it's writing to exists;
+if it does then it has to be a file that it's aware of creating before, or
+it will refuse to create it.
+
+Still, this sort of attack is something to keep in mind.
+
+## 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 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.
+
+## svn commit logs
+
+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.
+
+ikiwiki escapes any html in svn commit logs to prevent other mischief.
+
+## 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
-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..
+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.