Getting the Source of a CGI Script

kdepa · 04-28-2004, 06:06 PM

A friend of mine claimed to have retrieved the source code to a proxy CGI script that I run off of my webserver. I have strong doubts about his abilities to get anything except for the HTML source of the page. Do any of you know if it is possible to get the source of a perl CGI script when it is hosted off of a webserver? The Permissions are chmod 755 (-rwxr-xr-x).

marghorp · 04-28-2004, 07:07 PM

I don't think so. CGI is server side scripting and only outputs html to the browser. If he had seen your CGI script, either you have some problem with config of your server or he had broken into your computer, in that case you have some security issue. Otherwise a CGI script as PHP script can't be seen by someone browsing the net.

kdepa · 04-28-2004, 08:49 PM

Thats pretty much what I figured. I checked the server logs, and there weren't any suspicious login attempts - actually NO login attempts whatsoever, so I'm assuming he did not get in that way - I also use port forwarding on my server (just port 80) so there wasnt a way to SSH into the machine. Thanks for the help!

lrt2003 · 04-30-2004, 07:00 AM

ask him to show you what he found....

Inexactitude · 04-30-2004, 07:19 PM

You probably don't have much to worry about here, your friend is probably just trying to brag to you. As far as I know, there aren't any source leak exploits in the current version of apache (assuming that's tahw you use).

kdepa · 04-30-2004, 07:37 PM

Yeah he probably is. I asked him today if what he "found" worked, and it doesnt, apparently. I think he just got the html source and thinks that that's the entire cgi script's source - which it clearly isn't. Also, he probably thought it would go to the IP address listed in the source. That, however, is impossible because its a non-routable address. (10.0.0.x) Oh well. Just wanted to make sure that I did not have any major security leaks! Again, thanks very much for the help.