Trustwave's 2024 Retail Report Series Highlights Alarming E-Commerce Threats and Growing Fraud Against Retailers. Learn More
Get access to immediate incident response assistance.
Get access to immediate incident response assistance.
Trustwave's 2024 Retail Report Series Highlights Alarming E-Commerce Threats and Growing Fraud Against Retailers. Learn More
Last night I updated the code that provides the internal chroot functionality in mod_security. I am glad to announce version 1.8 will be much more reliable. The tricky part when doing chroot from within a module is that you don't know when to perform the call! Let me explain.
Apache modules are initialised twice. First attempt is a drill: Apache wants to know every module will know how to initialise itself (the configuration is correct, etc). The second attempt is the real thing. Unfortunately, a module does not (and cannot) know if it is being called for the first or for the second time.
The approach I used before is to look at the parent process id. It seemed to me the parent pid was always 1 (init) on second initialisation. As it turns out - I was wrong. In some instances the pid was different, causing mod_security to miss the opportunity to invoke chroot. To resolve this I rewrote the code to use a file on disk as a lock, and now it works great.
While I was doing that I used the opportunity and enhanced the code in other ways, to remove potential weaknesses and provide better error reporting when something goes wrong. The end result is a much more solid implementation. If you want to try it out - download the nightly CVS snapshoot.
Trustwave is a globally recognized cybersecurity leader that reduces cyber risk and fortifies organizations against disruptive and damaging cyber threats. Our comprehensive offensive and defensive cybersecurity portfolio detects what others cannot, responds with greater speed and effectiveness, optimizes client investment, and improves security resilience. Learn more about us.
Copyright © 2024 Trustwave Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.