others edit pages in your wiki, then some possible security issues do need
to be kept in mind.
+----
+
# Probable holes
-## XSS holes in CGI output
+_(The list of things to fix.)_
-ikiwiki has not yet been audited to ensure that all cgi script output is
-sanitised to prevent XSS attacks.
+## svn commit logs
-## image files etc attacks
+Anyone with svn 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.
+
+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 by using svn log --xml.
+
+ikiwiki escapes any html in svn commit logs to prevent other mischief.
+
+----
+
+# 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
Of course nobody else seems to worry about this in other wikis, so should we?
-## 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.
+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).
+Wsers 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
Just don't do it. [[ikiwiki.setup]] is *not* used as the setup file for
this wiki, BTW.
-## svn commit logs
-
-Anyone with svn 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.
-
-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 by using svn log --xml.
-
-ikiwiki escapes any html in svn commit logs to prevent other mischief.
-
## page locking can be bypassed via direct svn commits
-A [[lock]]ed page can only be edited on the web by an admin, but
+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.
+
----
# 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
Cracking the password only allows editing the wiki as that user though.
If you care, you can use https, I suppose.
+## 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.
+
+----
+
# Fixed holes
-_(Unless otherwise noted, these were discovered and immediatey fixed by the
+_(Unless otherwise noted, these were discovered and immediately fixed by the
ikiwiki developers.)_
## destination directory file replacement
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, and
-again when saving the changed page.
+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.
-This was fixed by making ikiwiki refuse to read or 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
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 a symlink), find a valid copy of
-the file in the underlaydir, and then when loading the file, mistekenly
-load the bad file from the srcdir.
+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.
-This attack is avoided by making ikiwiki scan the srcdir first, and refuse
-to add any files from the underlaydir if a file also exists in the srcdir
-with the same name. **But**, note that this assumes that any given page can
-be produced from a file with only one name (`page.mdwn` => `page.html`).
+## multiple page source issues
-If it's possible for files with different names to produce a given page, it
-would still be possible to use this attack to confuse ikiwiki into
-rendering the wrong thing. This is not currently possible, but must be kept
-in mind in the future when for example adding support for generating html
-pages from source with some other extension.
+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 [[HtmlSanitistion]], though it can be turned off.
+ikiwiki supports protecting users from their own broken browsers via the
+[[plugins/htmlscrubber]] plugin, which is enabled by default.