fbsd safety of the ports

[mikel king]

On Feb 7, 2012, at 5:15 PM, David Brodbeck wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 9:37 AM, dick <dick at nagual.nl> wrote:
>> I'm a bit confused. I always believed FreeBSD is a very safe system. That
>> may be true for the core files, but what about ports.
>> 
>> On the net I read _never_ to let the webserver be the owner of its files and
>> yet, ports like Drupal or WordPress make the files rwx for the owner (www)
>> as well as the group (www). How does this fit into fbsd's safety policy?
> 
> Content management systems are a bit of a sticky wicket for security.
> 
> The reason for not allowing the web server user to own files is so
> that someone who hacks a web app can't modify the site contents.  But
> the whole reason for running a CMS system is to allow modifying the
> site contents via a web app.
> 
> One compromise, used by TWiki and some other systems, is to make the
> content writable by web processes but the actual code read-only.
> That's more secure but it requires a lot of manual intervention for
> updates and configuration changes.  You *can* run WordPress this way,
> and it will be more secure, but you'll lose the automated update
> functionality as well as most of the web GUI configuration capability.
> Not necessarily a problem if you have good command line fu, but it
> can get tedious.

Sounds like a good area for a maintenance tool script. Run the script prior to updates/config changes to temporarily open the permissions. After the update has been completed rerun the script to re-secure the permissions. Probably included a little db back in the preparation.

Thoughts?
m