web2ldap - Security notes
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Don't use this for highly confidential data (as you should never
provide such data over Internet)!
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Note that every CGI-BIN is a security risk.
There's no warranty by the author of any kind!
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It's highly recommended deploying SSL and client certificates for
securing the LDAP access through this gateway!
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Good news: This CGI-BIN does not invoke any external program
(e.g. via the os.system() or os.popen() functions).
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Take care of the security configuration options in the source especially
when running with public access. Note that these options are not intended
for fine access control to the directory data itself. You have to rely
on the access control configured on your LDAP-host based on the Bind DN.
The CGI-BIN binds to a LDAP-host with a Bind-DN given by the user.
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The environment variables for SSL data is specific for mod_ssl
(preferred) or ApacheSSL (automatically used fallback option).
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All HTTP-headers have a 'Pragma: no-cache' or 'Expire' set to avoid
security problems with browsers and proxies caching secret data.
But be aware that some browsers/proxies ignore this and are caching all
data anyway. One solution to avoid caching by proxies is to use a
SSL-enabled web server because the web client uses the CONNECT-method
through the proxy.
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No input data should be written to web server/proxy logs
=> script method should be POST!
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Special HTML characters are converted to HTML representation
(see function escapeHTML() in module charset)
to address the problems described in
CERT Advisory CA-2000-02 - Malicious HTML Tags Embedded
in Client Web Requests. This is maybe not an overall solution
for this problem.