Re: Blatant security problem in certain CPAN module installs

[perrin]

Have you contacted the author and asked him to change this practice? He might be perfectly willing to do so if you point out the problem and ask him to fix it.

[tantarbobus]

I did. Or at least I tried. His webform was throwing errors, so I ended up sending it to the email address given with the error message.

Here is the text of the message that I sent to him:

Hello,

Earlier today I noticed that you have code in your Makefile.PLs that inclues and evals code served up from perl.4pro.com. While I am sure that you don't mean any harm in doing this, it nonetheless opens up several security holes.

For example, if your site were to be cracked, the intruder could insert code that would be run by any person installing your module. and many people install perl modules as root.

And then there is the issue of trust. How do I know that you are not changing the output of the file based on domain name of the person requesting the file? As a proof of concept, I wrote up a little script which illustrates my point:

http://www.remotelinux.com/rlippan/irony.cgi
And to see it in action: http://www.remotelinux.com/rlippan/irony


If you are not comming from 4pro.net, You can add domains to the list of evil_domains by passing in ?evil_domain=domain.dom

Thank you for your time,

Rudolf Lippan.