Re: [9fans] shell functions

[Kurt H Maier <khm@sciops.net>]

Quoting Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com>:

> The right fix is to eliminate all possible interaction between (1) and (2).
> The first public fix focused instead on making (1) more robust, and guess
> what, it wasn't good enough and now there is a *second* CVE about this
> problem, and a *second* attempt at making (1) more robust. It is almost
> certainly too late to change CGI, but bash could be changed to just ignore
> CGI's variables (HTTP_*), and I hope that's what will eventually happen.
> I'm not holding my breath: I bet we'll see a cascade of patches trying to
> make this interaction "safe" instead of removing it.
>

This is a heartbreakingly web-centric view of these issues.  The real
problem is that bash was evaling stuff that had () { in it, and it is
very, very much not relegated to CGI use.  There are exploits in the
wild for both DHCP and ssh.

Obviously bash is an awful shell, but munging it for apache is not the
right answer to anything.

khm