The tricky security issue with FollowSymLinks and Apache

tl;dr Most servers running a multi-user webhosting setup with Apache HTTPD probably have a security problem. Unless you're using Grsecurity there is no easy fix.

I am part of a small webhosting business that I run as a side project since quite a while. We offer customers user accounts on our servers running Gentoo Linux and webspace with the typical Apache/PHP/MySQL combination. We recently became aware of a security problem regarding Symlinks. I wanted to share this, because I was appalled by the fact that there was no obvious solution.

Apache has an option FollowSymLinks which basically does what it says. If a symlink in a webroot is accessed the webserver will follow it. In a multi-user setup this is a security problem. Here's why: If I know that another user on the same system is running a typical web application - let's say Wordpress - I can create a symlink to his config file (for Wordpress that's wp-config.php). I can't see this file with my own user account. But the webserver can see it, so I can access it with the browser over my own webpage. As I'm usually allowed to disable PHP I'm able to prevent the server from interpreting the file, so I can read the other user's database credentials. The webserver needs to be able to see all files, therefore this works. While PHP and CGI scripts usually run with user's rights (at least if the server is properly configured) the files are still read by the webserver. For this to work I need to guess the path and name of the file I want to read, but that's often trivial. In our case we have default paths in the form /home/[username]/websites/[hostname]/htdocs where webpages are located.

So the obvious solution one might think about is to disable the FollowSymLinks option and forbid users to set it themselves. However symlinks in web applications are pretty common and many will break if you do that. It's not feasible for a common webhosting server.

Apache supports another Option called SymLinksIfOwnerMatch. It's also pretty self-explanatory, it will only follow symlinks if they belong to the same user. That sounds like it solves our problem. However there are two catches: First of all the Apache documentation itself says that "this option should not be considered a security restriction". It is still vulnerable to race conditions.

But even leaving the race condition aside it doesn't really work. Web applications using symlinks will usually try to set FollowSymLinks in their .htaccess file. An example is Drupal which by default comes with such an .htaccess file. If you forbid users to set FollowSymLinks then the option won't be just ignored, the whole webpage won't run and will just return an error 500. What you could do is changing the FollowSymLinks option in the .htaccess manually to SymlinksIfOwnerMatch. While this may be feasible in some cases, if you consider that you have a lot of users you don't want to explain to all of them that in case they want to install some common web application they have to manually edit some file they don't understand. (There's a bug report for Drupal asking to change FollowSymLinks to SymlinksIfOwnerMatch, but it's been ignored since several years.)

So using SymLinksIfOwnerMatch is neither secure nor really feasible. The documentation for Cpanel discusses several possible solutions. The recommended solutions require proprietary modules. None of the proposed fixes work with a plain Apache setup, which I think is a pretty dismal situation. The most common web server has a severe security weakness in a very common situation and no usable solution for it.

The one solution that we chose is a feature of Grsecurity. Grsecurity is a Linux kernel patch that greatly enhances security and we've been very happy with it in the past. There are a lot of reasons to use this patch, I'm often impressed that local root exploits very often don't work on a Grsecurity system.

Grsecurity has an option like SymlinksIfOwnerMatch (CONFIG_GRKERNSEC_SYMLINKOWN) that operates on the kernel level. You can define a certain user group (which in our case is the "apache" group) for which this option will be enabled. For us this was the best solution, as it required very little change.

I haven't checked this, but I'm pretty sure that we were not alone with this problem. I'd guess that a lot of shared web hosting companies are vulnerable to this problem.

Here's the German blog post on our webpage and here's the original blogpost from an administrator at Uberspace (also German) which made us aware of this issue.